


Beauty and the Cosmic Horror

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [64]
Category: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Body Horror, Captivity, Comic Book Science, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Forced Orgasm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multiple Penetration, Other, Oviposition, Pseudo Parent/Child Incest, Spanking, Tentacle Monsters, Tentacle Rape, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-20
Updated: 2020-07-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:21:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25301530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Belle Langford goes on a one-woman mission to the end of the known universe to find out what happened to her father, a space developer who went to investigate whether a distant moon had potential for future human habitation months before and hasn’t been heard from since.Belle hopes to find her father alive and bring him back to Earth, but what she finds on this moon out in the far reaches of space turns out to be more than even her greatest hopes – or nightmares  – could ever conceive of.
Relationships: Belle | Beauty/Original Alien Character(s)
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [64]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 120
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	Beauty and the Cosmic Horror

**Author's Note:**

> 064/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #1 – universe. 
> 
> Certain elements and characters in this fic have been taken from Disney’s animated film version of Beauty and the Beast as well as other versions of the fairy tale, but it isn’t based on any one specific adaptation and leans more towards origfic than fanfic.

At the far end of the known universe, there was little more outside of Belle’s shuttle window except for an endless expanse of darkness with only the occasional asteroid belt or freckle of light coming off of some far away star to make things interesting. It was hard to look out into that vast nothingness and not feel small. Even if the shuttle were bigger than its double passenger size, Belle supposed that would be true. As she was the only person in her shuttle built for two, however…

“Claustrophobia,” she said aloud, resisting the urge to whisper as her setting and her solitude within it often seemed to compel her to do. “Designation: noun. Definition: fear of being in an enclosed space. Synonym: Isabelle Langford, for the last seven weeks...and hopefully not for a week longer if these navigational readings are right.”

The quiet that followed her speech was, well, disquieting for lack of better word. It always was. Belle had relished in that quiet for the first few weeks as it was similar enough to the quiet of her favorite library back on Earth to be comforting – and all the more so for the fact that there would be no Gaston Tenggren coming to interrupt her reading here in space – but the silence got to be too much even for one who often found solace in it after awhile. 

“Too much of a good thing,” Belle said. “Especially when there’s nothing to do with all this quiet but think.”

She eyed the pile of books she brought with her when she first set off on this trip with a feeling of almost betrayal. They were hardbacks the likes of which barely got made anymore instead of the data-burst chips that the people of Earth now preferred because they were cheaper, more compact, and made what would have taken hours to read only take minutes instead. Belle had foolishly thought that those thick bounds of paper would be enough to last her the duration, but she’d managed to go through them all in the first two weeks. She’d reread the ones she’d liked and then reread them again...and again. 

After three weeks into her trip, even she couldn’t stand to read the same books but so many times, and without anything to do but constantly check the navigational readings and bide her time, for the last month Belle had been feeling rather – 

“Stir-crazy,” she sighed. “Designation: adjective. Definition: to be mentally affected in the negative due to long-term confinement. Synonym: me.”

At least according to the navigational readings, she wouldn’t have to be on the shuttle for much longer. 

The moon so clinically designated as M49-6822 by the Earth Space Service was closer now than it ever was. At the speed Belle’s shuttle was going, she would be orbiting above the moon’s surface in just a matter of days. Only once above the moon would Belle’s shuttle be able to scan the surface and gather a picture of its terrain and what was on it. Whether there were any shuttles or ships and, if so, where they had landed...and whether there were any signs of life.

Belle had only three hopes in what she might find when she scanned M49-6822. First, that the shuttle she was looking for had landed on its surface. Second, that her father – the pilot of that shuttle – was still alive either in the vessel itself or elsewhere on the moon. And third, that she could find a practical way to reach her father’s life sign and mount a rescue.

The first hope was the main one that she clung to. It was that one on which all the others hinged. If the shuttle hadn’t landed on the moon, then this whole trip would have been for nothing. Belle would have no way of knowing where the shuttle was and no way of finding out. The only reason she had been able to mount this rescue mission was because she’d used her father’s own equipment to do it, and even those were limited. They weren’t capable of more than getting to the moon, scanning it, and getting back – no small feat, in the grand scheme, to be fair. 

Her father’s shuttles were some of the best small vessels in the known universe – and certainly they were the fastest. He’d put them to good use in his career in exploring space, finding human habitable planets even in the far areas of the universe no one had ever before explored, expanding the very definition of the ‘known universe’ in the process of developing those planets for habitation. 

But his shuttles weren’t built for search and rescue missions and it showed in how their capabilities were severely limited in comparison to those vessels that were meant for S&R purposes, that could scan not just one planet at a time but an entire galaxy – and not just for ships or life signs, but for the most minute pieces of debris floating through space or the smallest rocks on a planet’s surface.

Had Belle an actual S&R ship from the Earth Space Service, it would have been another matter entirely, but the ESS was resistant to offering her any help to speak of. They were polite about it, of course, in that bureaucratic way of theirs, but as far as they were concerned, her father was one man and a private contractor at that. He’d been warned that going so far out into the universe was dangerous and he’d undertaken the job knowing that and, therefore, he’d also undertaken the risks that went with it. 

Besides, S&R vessels were expensive to make and took a lot of fuel and personnel to send to even the most populated areas of the known universe – to send one to the farthest reaches and only to rescue one man...the ESS made it clear they were very sorry for Belle’s “loss”, but there was nothing they could do to help.

Out of desperation, Belle had even went to Gaston, a captain in the ESS, and lowered herself to indulging in his attraction to her, hoping he might be able to help where his colleagues would not. She’d all but prostrated herself before him, begging him for help, and he’d been excited enough at the prospect of her finally ‘giving in’ to him but even that wouldn’t move him to assist her with rescuing her father. He’d advised her in blunt terms to accept the fact that her father was gone and that it was time she moved on with her life – namely, with him.

Belle had ended up kneeing him in the balls for that and walking away, enraged and determined that if no one would help her, then she would have no choice but to help herself. She was on one of her father’s shuttles just a few days later with the same course he had taken months before plotted into its navigation system. She’d left Earth as soon as possible and not once looked back.

And now, weeks later, she was only days away from landing on the same moon her father had been headed towards. He’d hoped to see if this moon would be worth developing as he had with dozens of moons and planets before. That this moon was so far flung out didn’t dissuade him, but only made the prospect more attractive.

“Who wants to live on a crowded planet when they can get a moon all to themself, huh?” he’d asked her when telling her about this latest trip, giving her a nudge and a wink. It was a familiar refrain that her father had repeated many times over the years and Belle had always grinned with good humor when he said it. 

Belle knew that if she had to choose, she’d rather live on a moon of her own, and that her father knew it just as well as she did. The only thing that stopped her from making the move already was that she enjoyed living with her father on Earth and there were amenities there – like libraries and museums and the sheer history of the planet, just for a start – that couldn’t be found elsewhere, not even on planets as bustling as Mars was these days.

Although, even if she found the prospect of living on a moon attractive, she knew she’d never want to live on a moon so very far from Earth. Technology made such a thing safe for humans, of course, in ways their late ancestors who had to wear bulky full-body suits just to visit Earth’s own moon could never imagine, but the distance still seemed more vast than was comfortable. That there was a month and a half trip between M49-6822 and Earth even with the fastest of shuttles wasn’t very attractive, either. 

Still, despite that distance, Belle hadn’t worried for her father when he left. He’d made long trips before and always he’d come back safely with some new story of a planet he was colonizing and the people who had put in bids to him to have homes or businesses put there. 

The Earth Space Service’s rules of colonization were simple enough: any currently unclaimed and uninhabited planet or moon could be claimed by the first person registered with the ESS Colonization Corps who set foot on the planet’s surface and then preceded to transmit the proper forms (as well as a fee that varied depending on that planet’s closeness to Earth or other high-population areas) back to the ESS. After a waiting period, their claim would either be accepted or denied. If accepted, the new owner of the planet could rename the planet from the ESS’ designation to something more palatable (for another fee, of course) and they would be obligated to pay an annual tax to the ESS to maintain their ownership. The new owners of those planets could then do with them what they wanted, from building homes that they could rent out to prospective to tenants to building business offices to mining the planet for any useful substances to a thousand other things. 

Belle’s father had made his living doing just that – being the first man on a planet or a moon, making his claim, and then developing that planet for a dozen different kinds of human use. He had been gone for long stretches of time before, the longest being over a year, but he always came home when scheduled. She had no reason to think that things would be any different when he left for M49-6822, but unlike all the other times her father had left and returned home right on time, this time he didn’t.

In the months after his arrival date had come and gone with no word from him – and especially in the weeks Belle had been on her shuttle heading to M49-6822 herself – she had worn herself down imagining all the possible reasons he hadn’t returned to Earth. 

The best case scenario would be some malfunction with his shuttle that had left him stranded on the moon, but left the replicator in it intact so that he could still eat and drink, and left him without any injuries that the limited medical tech on his shuttle couldn’t handle. The tech implants that her father had and that were standard for anyone who ever left Earth, even just for the occasional trip to Luna or Mars, would handle the rest: the atemtech implant in his throat would convert the air of even the most inhospitable places to oxygen and filter out harmful substances every time he breathed, the zermaltech implants in his ankles would help him to walk on the moon’s surface no matter what the gravity level was, and the klimatech implant in his chest would regulate his body temperature so that if the moon was too hot or too cold for the human body to handle, his body would be able to not only handle it, but to thrive as well as it could on Earth.

If he was just stranded, but still had everything he needed to survive and wasn’t horribly hurt, all Belle’s father would have to do would be to hunker down and wait. He would know that Belle wouldn’t just leave him there. He would know that she wouldn’t rest until she found him.

But that was only the best case scenario. There were thousands more that were just as, if not more, likely and Belle’s imagination tortured her by coming up with even more.

Her father’s shuttle might have suffered some unpredictable, catastrophic failure and been destroyed before ever reaching M49-6822 – something that happened even to the best ships of the ESS on rare occasions. He might have been waylaid by pirates. He might have flown into an asteroid belt and been unable to maneuver around the giant, jagged rocks that constituted them. He might’ve had something as utterly mundane as a heart attack or a stroke in-flight or on the moon itself. He might’ve tripped on a rock on the moon’s surface, fallen over, and bashed his head in. He might have had that malfunction on his shuttle that played the main role in Belle’s best case scenario, but the replicator was broken and he’d ended up starving to death or dying of dehydration. 

In what would constitute as ‘late at night’ by Earth’s twenty-four hour clock, but meant nothing in the cold expanse of space, Belle’s imagination even played with the idea that her father had stumbled across extraterrestrial life and had run afoul of it. 

It was the most unlikely and laughable possibility yet, but no matter that Earth had spread its tendrils throughout the universe in every direction over the last thousand or so years and found that humans were indeed alone in it, people still imagined that someday that would change and loved to picture how in hopeful or, just as often, gruesome detail. Belle didn’t particularly like horror books, but she read them on occasion, and she hated imagining her father as the star in one of them, no matter how improbable such a possibility might be.

Even more than that, however, she hated imagining the much more probable scenarios. She hated imagining her father might be dead, no matter how that might have happened, and what she hated the most was imagining that he could have been alive for all the time she’d spent trying to get the ESS to help her rescue him or while she was in this shuttle on her way to M49-6822, that he might die just scant days or hours or even minutes before she arrived to save him.

Belle’s mother had died when she was just a child in one of those ‘rare occasions’ that an ESS ship suffered a catastrophic failure. Alina Langford had been a young lieutenant in the ESS aboard a maintenance vessel whose sole purpose was to maintain ESS satellites placed throughout the known universe, so that communications could be transmitted even over great distances. It was an important job and one that Alina had taken pride in doing.

After Belle was born, her mother had taken time off for maternity leave and wanted desperately to return to work as soon as the time was up, but even though she loved her job, she still felt guilty at the thought of leaving Belle. Belle’s father had convinced her that it was fine, that Belle herself would understand when she was older that her mother had dreams and a career and a life outside of just being a mother. He’d told his wife that if Belle was smart – which she was sure to be, considering who her mother was – she’d only respect her mother more for being so committed to her career.

Alina was convinced. She returned to work as soon as her leave was done. 

In less than a month, she would be dead. 

The official cause of the catastrophic failure on the ship Alina was on was reported as a ‘critical malfunction of the posterior ancillary valve due to excess debris’. The nearest Earth equivalent to compare it to would be if a vacuum stopped working because it had too much dirt in its bag. Not such a big deal on Earth, but in space and on a ship the size of the one Belle’s mother was on, the results were explosive, as well as unpredictable and incurable. Such a failure could happen in a matter of seconds, too fast for even the ship’s alarms to go off and be heard, much less long enough for anyone to try to fix the issue or, when fixing it was obviously impossible, make it to the escape pods on the ship. 

There was a one in fifty three point nine million chance that such a failure could happen – those were the odds the news feeds had reported all across the known universe when the ship was destroyed. Belle read from those odds this: that her mother had died because of something as simple, and as simply cruel, as bad luck.

The thought of her father dying for the same reason sickened her. 

Belle knew that he still felt responsible, in part, for her mother’s death. He’d confided that in Belle before and when she asked why on Earth he’d feel that way, he told her he knew it didn’t make sense. It was all a matter of ifs he told her. If only he’d agreed with Alina that perhaps she should stay home a little longer, she would still be alive. It was irrational, he knew. He also knew that he was entirely right in telling Alina to go back to work, that she would be miserable if she couldn’t and he had no right – or desire – to ask that of her, but he also said that didn’t help a single bit with the guilt, with feeling like if only he’d done something differently then his wife and the mother of his child would still be alive. 

Belle wondered if she would feel responsible for her father’s death if it turned out that he was dead. Would she go about the rest of her life feeling guilty that she had responded favorably about his trip to M49-6822 when he first told her about it? Would she feel guilty that she hadn’t asked him to stay home for a little longer, to postpone his trip to that far off moon so that they might spend some time together as a family instead?

“Hope,” Belle whispered with nothing but the great, empty darkness outside her shuttle to hear her. “Designation: noun. Definition: the trust that what is wanted will happen.”

A fine quality, that. 

Belle had to trust that she would find her father alive and that she would be able to take him back to Earth and that all of this would someday become nothing more than a funny story they told at holiday parties years down the line.

“Remember that time you were stranded on a moon?” Belle might ask her father and they’d both laugh about it and about how ridiculous it was while their guests pressed them for details.

“You know, I once saved my father when he was stranded on a moon,” Belle might someday tell her own children at bedtime – if she ever had children, that was. She wasn’t sure yet if she wanted to.

What Belle was sure about was that she wanted to find her father alive, that she wanted this entire nightmare to be put behind them and someday be something not as serious as it was now. For it to be nothing more than a silly joke about a past adventure, a thing they could laugh about without her feeling the panic that she felt now or the despair. 

Belle desperately didn’t want to go to M49-6822 and find no sign that her father was ever there. She desperately didn’t want to find his shuttle, but no sign of life.

She had to keep her hope that she would find him and that he would be alright when she did. She had to trust in that possibility, to trust that it wasn’t just one possibility out of a thousand but the only one that could possibly be true. 

She had to, or else she didn’t know how she was going to live with herself in the universe alone.

*

M49-6822 was the only moon that orbited around a planet designated by the ESS with the equally descriptive name P68-0735. The planet itself was one of seven others which orbited around a sun that was designated simply as S35, all of which were heavily spread apart even by spacial standards.

P68-0735 wasn’t a particularly exciting planet in the scheme of things, as far as Belle was concerned. It was approximately the same size as Earth, but was missing all the things that made Earth so naturally habitable for humans. There were no oceans on the planet, no rivers, no forests, and – as far as Belle’s shuttle’s scans were telling her – no plant or animal life of any kind. The average temperature was a twenty degree difference from the temperatures on Earth, both for the colder and hotter depending on the area of the planet one focused on, and the planet itself seemed to consist almost entirely of a mixture of substances whose closest Earth comparison was concrete. The gravity on the planet was close enough to Earth’s gravity that one would be able to walk fairly easily on its surface even without a zermaltech implant, but the air on the planet would not have been breathable without an atemtech implant and would likely not smell very good even with it. 

Somewhat surprisingly, however, the planet had been claimed. 

Belle’s scan showed this information, but her father had also told her before he left for M49-6822 that the planet his moon orbited was taken. He said that the man who claimed it had it in his head to build some sort of resort-slash-theme park on the planet, a getaway for people who wanted to get farther away from Earth than just Pluto, which was the most popular ‘getaway’ destination in the Milky Way galaxy and was well known for having the largest ski slopes in the known universe. He was apparently of the opinion that people who wanted to think of themselves as explorers in the same vein as their late Earth ancestors would get a kick out of being at the very end of human explored space while being able to do without the uncertainty that came with branching out farther than the parts of the universe that humans had yet to map out.

The man in question had done nothing to get his project started yet according to Belle’s scan of the planet, which showed nothing whatsoever on its surface, though that probably meant little considering that the annual tax for a planet so far away from any populated areas of space tended to be very low and wouldn’t put him anywhere near being in debt if he decided to wait as much as a century before he began building. 

Belle’s father had told her he held out hope that the man might give up on it and sell the planet to him eventually. It was the perfect planet for a few manufacturing centers, he’d told her, especially if the area were to become more populated which – considering how the human population continued to grow and more of that population took to space outside of the Milky Way – seemed all but inevitable. 

That was only a secondary project, however; Belle’s father had been more interested in the moon and as the man who owned the planet had no interest in claiming it – deeming the idea of developing moons in general, apparently, too passe for his tastes – her father had set his sights on it for his own.

Now, as Belle passed P68-0735 by, she set her sights on the moon as well. 

If the planet resembled little more than a great grey ball of concrete, dry and dull all over, then the moon was its exact opposite. It was smaller than Belle thought it would be, and smaller than Earth’s own moon, Luna. The color of it was a pitch black that was only visible in the darkness of space because of a sort of slick shine that permeated across its entire surface, making it look like a glossy marble in Belle’s shuttle window. Looking at it, Belle had the idea that if she could just swipe her palm across it, it would leave her hands stained with ink. 

In a way, it was almost beautiful. Belle wondered if her father thought the same when he first saw it...if he first saw it, that was.

“Time to find that out,” Belle said, grimacing at the wariness she heard in her own voice.

Her hands were shaking as she tapped into her console the commands necessary to scan the moon in front of her. When she was done, she collapsed back into her chair and shut her eyes tightly. She inhaled a shaky breath and then exhaled what felt like all the air in her body.

“Time,” she said firmly, willing her heartbeat to calm. “Designation: noun. Definition: a period or duration, the right instant or hour, a system of measuring the hours or days, an occasion, a set period of –“

The console beeped, interrupting her recitation. 

Belle’s eyes snapped open and she scrambled towards the console to read the results. Her eyes ran across the screen rapidly, taking the information in…

And she laughed, loud and happy with relief. 

“Subject: M49-6822,” she read through a grin. “Status: Claimed. Claimant: Langford Space Developments. Claim Status: Pending.”

That the moon had been claimed by her father was proof enough to Belle that he’d made it to the moon’s surface before she even read that the scan showed one vessel on its surface. One vessel and – 

“One life sign.” 

Belle laughed again, softly, a barely there sound. Her eyes were glued to the scan of moon’s terrain and the small green dot on it which designated a single human life on the moon’s surface as though she were afraid that if she took her eyes away from it, it might disappear. 

Her hope had paid off. Her trust was well given. Her father was alive on M49-6822 and there was nothing stopping Belle now from rescuing him and taking him back to Earth. 

“Nothing except a bit of a walk, that is,” Belle muttered, looking at the scan of M49-6822 and the distance between the green dot which denoted her father’s position and the blue dot that showed where his shuttle had landed. 

Belle frowned at the distance, not quite understanding it. It was a couple of kilometers, at least, and the land her father had apparently walked was rocky terrain. She could understand if he’d walked that far after landing, to scope out the moon’s surface, but after he returned to his shuttle and discovered it wouldn’t work – because, surely, that’s what happened or else he would have returned to Earth as scheduled – the smart thing to do would be to stay in the shuttle. The replicator was there, meaning a steady source of food and water was there, too.

Belle checked the rest of the telemetry from M49-6822 and was surprised to discover that the moon was more naturally habitable to humans than the planet it orbited was. The air had an acceptable level of oxygen, the moon itself an even more Earth-like level of gravity that P68-0735, and an average temperature that was only about five degrees more than the average on Earth – for the hotter or colder, depending on where on the moon you looked. In the area Belle’s father was located, the temperature was warm but not overwhelmingly so. None of their implants would really even need to kick in for the moon to be survivable for them.

The moon had no major oceans, but it did have a wide network of rivers that reached across most of the moon’s surface, very wide in some areas and very thin in others. There were clusters of plant life that the shuttle’s scanners classified as ‘forestland’ but none of the plants it picked up were in the ESS Botanical Database, and likewise while the scanners could tell there was animal life of some kind, because it wasn’t in the ESS Wildlife Database, it couldn’t tell Belle what those animals were or anything about them other than the fact that they existed.

And while the shuttle’s scanners could identify the elements that P68-0735 was composed of, it couldn’t do so for M49-6822.

“Soil components: unidentifiable. Plant components: unidentifiable. Water components: unidentifiable. Animal components: unidentifiable,” Belle muttered. “What can you identify, you damned machine? You can tell that plants are plants and water is water, but not what’s in them? The atmosphere is so similar to Earth...shouldn’t the hydrogen in the water at least be identifiable...?”

Belle reran the scan, inputting an additional request for more information. When the data came back, she studied the terrain of the moon and was further frustrated to realize that there was nowhere closer to her father’s location that she could land other than right beside where his own shuttle had landed in the first place. The rest of the surrounding area was too rocky or the ground too fragile to stand the weight of a shuttle landing on it. The scanners also pinpointed a system of caves underground and – Belle’s heart sank – it looked like her father was in them rather than simply somewhere on the surface.

“Could he have fallen…?” Belle pursed her lips at the thought and reminded herself that her father was alive. Even if he’d fallen into some cave, it hadn’t hurt him enough to seriously injure him – it couldn’t have, not if he was still alive after so long. 

But that made her wonder just how he could have stayed alive. If he’d been stuck underground for months on end, it meant that he’d had no access to the replicator on his shuttle, and he had to have been eating and drinking something. That made Belle think that either there was some animal life in the caves that he could easily capture and eat or else some sort of edible plants that he’d been living on, as well as a source of water, or –

“Or he hasn’t been in the cave for that long,” she deduced. “He only left his shuttle recently and became trapped after, but why leave in the first place?”

The ESS made all prospective space pilots pass a safety course before they were given a license for piloting even the smallest vessels. Belle had taken the course and so had her father, so he would know just as she did that standard operating procedure in the event of being stranded planetside was to stay with the ship unless it was unsafe to stay or it became absolutely necessary to leave it for some other reason. 

Why had her father felt it necessary? Had the replicator in his shuttle suddenly stopped working, forcing him to go out and forage for water and food? That seemed most likely to Belle. Or had something else driven him out of his shuttle and into that rocky landscape where he somehow ended up underground? 

Belle was frowning, studying the data as if it could suddenly answer her questions. 

The console remained stubbornly silent in response to her observation. 

“Well,” she said slowly, “I’m not going to find out by staying in orbit, am I?”

The console again offered no helpful advice.

Belle sighed and began inputting directions to land into the navigation. 

“Estimated time of arrival,” she read when she was done putting in the command, “one hour, twenty-seven minutes. Alright, then.”

Belle leaned back in her seat and crossed her arms over her chest. Despite her frustration at the lack of information her scan of M49-6822 had given her and her trepidation at what she might find on the moon, she felt a smile pulling at her mouth anyway.

“My dad’s alive,” she said and laughed quietly, the sound on the verge of a sob. 

It was only then that Belle realized how much she wasn’t expecting to find him alive at all. That for as much as she hoped and as much as she wished and as much as she had argued against anyone who said her father was gone and he wasn’t coming back, there was a part of her that believed what they said, too, a part of her that was now surprised to find that all the things she’d hoped for were true after all.

Guilt sank like a stone in her stomach at the realization. 

Belle sniffled and shook her head, trying to clear it. 

“It doesn’t matter,” she told herself. “He’s alive and I’m going to save him. Any doubts I might’ve had are gone now and if there’s any left...they can stay up in space and rot for all I care.”

All Belle needed to worry about now was making it to the moon’s surface and what came after. Nothing else was a priority. Nothing else could matter.

*

M49-6822 might have had the same oxygen levels as Earth, the same gravity, and the same temperatures, but the onyx shine Belle saw from space was even more obvious and more detailed as her shuttle broke atmosphere and prepared to land. 

Everything on the moon was black. The trees and their leaves, the grass, the mountains, the rivers, even the flock of birds that took off from the ground, startled, as Belle’s shuttle touched down next to her father’s shuttle – all of it was made up of more unique shades of black than Belle had thought existed before seeing it, the lightest of which being a color that could only be labeled a charcoal grey if one was being generous. All of it looked slightly shiny, a sort of slickness or gloss coating everything. It was a jarring sight compared to the rainbow of colors that made up Earth that Belle was used to, but it wasn’t unattractive. She certainly found it prettier than the reds and oranges that made up Mars, at any rate.

The only thing that wasn’t black as far as Belle’s eyes could see was the sky. That was, instead, a pale silver that seemed to sparkle as if it were embedded with glitter all over. S35, the sun, was a giant white circle on the low end of its expanse and P68-0735 wasn’t currently visible from Belle’s position on the moon’s surface. By the moon’s current location compared to the sun, it was currently what you’d call morning where Belle was on M49-6822. She couldn’t help but wonder what that sky would look like at night, when the place on the moon where she would be would no longer be facing the sun.

Dark, she assumed. She hoped she wasn’t on the moon long enough to find out. 

Belle approximated that her father’s current location was about a two hour’s hike from the location of their shuttles. She would have to be careful once she got there and searched for a safe entrance to the moon’s underground caves, preferably one that her father could get through easily in case he was injured. Depending on his health, the hike back to the shuttles would take another two hours or longer. All in all, that meant…

“As little as five hours,” Belle determined, “if everything goes easily. Maybe as much as eight if it doesn’t.”

And that was saying nothing of the long flight back to Earth. 

“It’ll be worth spending a few more weeks in this thing just to have him with me and know he’s safe,” Belle sighed, “and the sooner we can get up in the air, the better.”

Belle got up from her seat and went to open the shuttle’s storage panels. She pulled out a travel bag and began packing it with what she thought might be necessary, but nothing more. She was mindful that what might seem to be a manageable weight to carry now could become cumbersome after five, much less eight, hours of walking. 

Into the bag went a portable replicator she could use to make whatever food and drink she might need to keep up her energy; a set of utensils that she could eat with; a thermos and plate she could replicate her drink and food onto; a mediwand, which could heal minor cuts and breaks; a cleansiwand, which she could clean herself and her eating tools with; a jacket, in case she was on the moon long enough for it to get cold; and a flashlight she could use once she got into the cave system itself.

“That’s enough of that,” she said, zipping the bag up before putting her head through the strap which ended up resting across her chest while the bulk of the bag itself rested at her left hip. It weighed, perhaps, five kilograms. It was a light enough weight that she wouldn’t be cursing it if her mission lasted longer than the minimum of five hours she had estimated.

Next, she pulled out a stunner and a holster for it to go into and attached them to her right hip. It was the strongest weapon her father’s shuttles came equipped with and though it couldn’t cause any real harm, it would be enough to make any of the ‘unidentifiable animal life’ on the moon think twice about bothering her if they tried.

“Or just make them angrier,” Belle muttered, remembering how Gaston had once tested one of those stunners out on a random maintenance tech who was unfortunate enough to just be in the same room in order to ‘show off’ to Belle and afterwards derisively called the thing the high tech equivalent of a newspaper being swatted on a dog’s nose when it had only knocked the poor guy down and made him feel very dazed for a few minutes.

Belle couldn’t disagree with the assessment, even though she hated to agree with Gaston on anything and found his behavior appalling, but it wasn’t her father’s fault that the ESS restricted weapons ownership so tightly that only their own people were allowed what Gaston called the ‘real guns’. 

A stunner was better than nothing, at least. It wouldn’t do much good if Belle happened to run into an animal that was larger than a human being and posed a threat to her that she couldn’t hide or run from, but there was a low chance of that anyway. Large predators had proven rare in the years that human beings had spent exploring the universe and most of those had been oceanic species that proved to be no danger to explorers who kept their feet firmly on land as Belle herself planned to do now. 

The very few predatory species that didn’t fit that bill hadn’t proven to be a threat for long. Homo sapiens, as they had throughout all of history, continued to prove to be at the top of the food chain no matter where they were or what they were up against. It was a bloody history, but at least it meant that the odds were in Belle’s favor that there was nothing on M49-6822 that she couldn’t handle. 

Still, though…

“A better weapon couldn’t hurt,” she complained, knowing already that it was a useless thing to say, especially now. She was hardly going to find a weapons shop on this far off moon just waiting for her business, now was she?

The last thing Belle took out before shutting the storage panels was a techpad, a square device about the same size as the palm of her hand that she could attach to her wrist with a band like it was a large watch. She attached it so and then tapped at its screen to turn it on and access the shuttle’s scans through its interface. She typed in a command, inputting her desire to make her way on foot to the location of her father’s life sign, and waited. The techpad was silent for a moment, then chirped, and on Belle’s screen was what the shuttle had determined would be the best possible route she could take to get to her desired destination. 

“Estimated time of arrival,” Belle read, “two hours and ten minutes.”

Belle’s approximation had been spot on, then, give or take a little.

“Alright, then,” she sighed. Belle gave a glance around the shuttle, thinking hard about whether there was anything she was forgetting. There wasn’t, she determined. 

“Alright,” she said again, steeling herself. 

She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly, feeling instantly better for doing it. 

She opened the shuttle door with a command entered into her techpad and with a hiss, the door slowly lowered to the ground. 

“I’m on my way, dad,” Belle said softly as she started walking, wishing with all her heart that it was possible for her father to hear her so far away. “Just hang on a little longer and we’ll be home before we know it.”

Belle exited the shuttle. The moment her feet were on M49-6822’s surface, she tapped out another command on her techpad and heard the door hiss as it began to rise behind her. 

“Time to go,” Belle said out into the great black glossiness of the moon. 

Her father was waiting.

*

The blackness of M49-6822 was much more startling on the surface than it was from orbit. Up close now, all the shades of black were much more clear. Belle could make out each individual shade and could tell how minutely one differed from another, just enough to make everything on the moon three-dimensional in a way that her eyes kept blinking to adjust themselves to. 

The shininess of the black was like a fine gloss on everything and when Belle knelt down to run her hands across the black grass beneath her feet, she was somewhat surprised at how normal it felt, like grass back on Earth. When she looked at her palm, there was no inky black smear across it. The grass only looked wet, but in actuality it was dry, and Belle assumed the same was true for the trees and everything else. She wondered when – or if – it ever actually rained.

The temperature was, as her scans had promised her, comfortably warm and Belle noticed no difference between the gravity here and that on Earth. She could feel no undue pressure holding her down at her shoulders and the feeling of weights around her ankles that the zermaltech implants caused on low-gravity planets wasn’t present here at all. The air was pleasantly breathable, though there was a scent to it that reminded Belle of brown sugar of all things. It wasn’t cloying, it was barely there, but after breathing in the pure air the moon had to offer, it lingered in her nostrils like an after-scent. She could even taste it in the back of her throat, dark and sweet, after awhile.

Other than the flock of birds that had taken off when her shuttle landed, Belle could spot no animal life in the nearby vicinity. The moon was eerily silent of any accompanying animal sounds, too – no birds singing, no crickets chirping, nothing to show that anyone but Belle was even there. 

She thought of the stunner at her hip. 

“Let’s hope there are no dogs to whack on the nose here, then.” 

The silence after she spoke was even louder here than it was on her shuttle. 

Belle pushed past her discomfort at the quiet and reminded herself she had things to do other than sightseeing. She made her way to her father’s shuttle parked about five meters away and once there, she made a slow circuit around the vessel with her eyes and techpad both scanning it for any obvious signs of damage. 

Her father’s shuttle was identical to Belle’s own with the only difference being that it had the name Langford 001 painted in blue across its side while Belle’s ship was painted with the designation Langford 002. The rest of the ship’s exterior was a dull grey and it had an almost rectangular shape, but with a rounded top and none of the sharp edges that a true rectangle would have. It was approximately ten meters tall and just as wide, big enough for two people to spend a long voyage in or – as Belle’s father liked to say – one person who valued having the space to stretch out their legs.

Belle’s eyes could find no damage to the shuttle to speak of, but she knew well that there were plenty of possible malfunctions a ship could have that were invisible to the human eye or to outside scans. 

When her techpad chirped, its opinion was the same as Belle’s.

“Exterior status: no damage detected. Alright, let’s look inside of you, then...”

She tapped at her techpad, accessing Langford 001’s controls. All of her father’s shuttles ran on the same interface and so opening his shuttle was no more difficult than opening her own, so long as she had a techpad keyed into the interface to do it with. After a few minutes, the door of her father’s shuttle hissed and began to lower. Belle waited until it hit the ground before she walked in, making careful observation of the interior as she did. 

It looked nearly identical to the interior of Belle’s shuttle. If anything, it looked even better. After just weeks of flying, Belle’s shuttle was cluttered with her books and other signs of her confinement, but that wasn’t so on the shuttle she was standing in. Nothing looked out of place. Nothing looked dirty or strange. There was nothing at all inside the shuttle that was visible to the naked eye to suggest either that anything bad had happened in it or that a person had been living within it for months on end. Belle knew her father liked to keep things neat, but she still expected to see some sign of clutter or habitation after so long. The shuttle, however, looked as clean as it had the day her father had left for M49-6822 in it.

Frowning, Belle made her way to the pilot’s seat and slowly lowered herself into it. Some strange feeling arose in her chest at the thought that her father had been the last person to sit in the seat and now here she was, taking his place. The feeling wasn’t altogether a comfortable one. 

When she put her hands on the shuttle’s console and pressed the right buttons, it came to life easily, the screen lighting up and asking for input. Belle put in a command for it to run a full system’s scan and remained poised on the edge of her seat as she waited for it to be done.

“Suspense,” she muttered impatiently. “Designation: noun. Definition: tense uncertainty, also known as my current state of being.”

The long minute it took for the shuttle to come back with the results of the scan felt like an eternity. The chirp it made signifying it was done had hardly finished sounding before Belle was leaning forward, looking through the results.

“Engine status: functioning. Valve status: functioning. Navigation status: functioning. Replicator status,” Belle paused, frowning at the result, “...functioning.”

She scrolled quickly through the rest of the scan, looking for anything that had a status that was something other than ‘functioning’. She found nothing. The shuttle, as far as the scan was telling her, was perfectly operable. All systems were working as they should. Belle could close the shuttle’s door right now, take it into orbit, and set a course for Earth and nothing would impede her whatsoever from doing it. 

Which meant there was nothing stopping her father from doing the same.

Which meant that he had landed the shuttle and left it...and then simply hadn’t come back. 

“Have you been in that cave all this time?” Belle whispered. 

She found it hard to credit the idea. It would mean that her father had been stuck underground for months – months! Belle could hardly stand being stuck in her shuttle for half so long, but at least her shuttle had amenities that kept her fed and clean, if not particularly intellectually stimulated after she’d read through her books multiple times. The idea of being trapped underground seemed infinitely worse. There would be no way to stay clean and Belle couldn’t imagine what her father had been eating or drinking to stay alive down there.

It also painted a poor picture of what it would be like to rescue her father, as well.

Belle’s father wasn’t as fit a man as someone like Gaston was – and thankfully, he shared no other qualities with Gaston, either, as far as Belle was concerned – but his work required a certain level of activity and he wasn’t out of shape by any stretch. That he had managed to somehow become trapped within a cave in the first place was worrying on its own, especially considering that his own techpad should have warned him of them and the weakness of any ground above them, but that he hadn’t been able to get out of that cave in all the time he’d been missing was even more worrying.

Her father was in shape, he was intelligent, he was resourceful. If he’d just fallen into some loose ground and hadn’t been badly injured in the fall, Belle believed he would have found a way out by now – and yet he hadn’t. 

Belle pictured her father with two broken legs, the cave he was in caved in and impassable. Her stomach turned with nausea and concern at the image and the thought of how she might get him out if that was what was keeping him stuck down there. She was apprehensive about her own ability to save him if that was the case.

“Don’t be stupid,” Belle scolded herself. The motions of her fingers were nearly violent as she tapped at the console to shut the shuttle’s systems back down. “You didn’t come this far just to give up because things might be harder than expected. It doesn’t matter if his legs are broken or if the cave is caved in. All that matters is that he’s alive and you know where he is. Going back to Earth alone isn’t an option.”

She stood suddenly from the pilot’s seat, turned, and stomped out of the shuttle. She used her techpad to command the shuttle’s door to shut and didn’t even wait to hear the tell-tale hiss of it lifting before she switched back to the scan of the planet’s terrain and the path her shuttle had given her as the best to take so that she might reach her father’s position. 

“Determination,” Belle bit out as she set off in the direction her techpad advised her to. “Designation: noun. Definition: a firm intention or a firmness of purpose. Synonyms: me, myself, and I, you stupid fucking moon.”

*

Belle kept a careful pace as she followed the route that would lead to her father’s location. A large part of her wanted to go faster, wanted to run and not stop until the red dot on her techpad that represented her own life sign was right over the green dot that belonged to her father, but she knew doing that would be folly. 

If she expended too much energy too quickly, she would only be exhausted later and that could prove dangerous depending on what, if any, difficulties ‘later’ happened to present. If she didn’t take the time to pay attention to where she was walking and to the readouts that her techpad was showing her of the terrain, she could very well end up falling through a patch of weak ground and become trapped just as her father had been.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” she reminded herself, “and the rabbit who gets distracted along the way loses every time.”

The walk wasn’t very difficult at first. The ground closest to where the shuttles were parked was flat and grassy with no detritus that might trip her up. It therefore presented as little difficulty as the running trails Belle visited back on Earth did for her; in any other situation the walk through that onyx landscape might even be pleasant. Belle hoped that her father had at least been able to enjoy it himself before everything went so wrong.

Gradually, however, that grassy flatland began to give way to less tractable terrain. There began to be less grass beneath Belle’s feet and more spots of sandy black soil, then that black soil turned into black stone, and after a time that black stone went from being flat to something more rocky and jagged. The incline increased bit by bit until it got to the point that even at the slowest, steadiest pace, Belle could feel the strain of her every step in her calf and thigh muscles as she ascended. After awhile of that, she was breathing heavily and her body was covered in a sheen of sweat. 

All along, Belle continued to check her techpad at regular intervals. This was both so that she made sure she was sticking to the correct route, but also because every time she felt like she wanted to stop – to just sit down and rest for fifteen minutes or twenty – the sight of her father’s life sign urged her on. Belle could see the distance between her and his location closing slowly, but surely, and she knew that if she just kept going, it was only inevitable that she would be there soon enough.

And then finally, she was.

Her techpad made a chirping sound that had Belle halting in place and scrambling to check it. On the screen she saw the red dot of her life sign...and just a shade of the green that belong to her father’s. Her red was eclipsing most of the green. According to the techpad, Belle was right on top of him. 

She laughed, the sound breathless and tired, but also elated with triumph. She wiped the sweat off her face with the back of her arm and pushed a loose lock of hair behind her ear. She looked down at the ground she stood on – a hilly spot covered in crumbly black gravel – and around it, but could see no sign of holes or openings of any kind where a person might have fallen through. According to the scan, while her father was right below her, the place Belle stood was solid. There were several meters of ground beneath her feet and it was tightly packed. Even if she had a shovel, it would be impossible for her to dig through it all. 

“Okay, so you didn’t go down here, but somewhere else and somehow you made it to the position you’re in now...looking for a way out?” Belle muttered, her mind racing.

It was a probable scenario. If her father had fallen into the cave elsewhere and been unable to get out the way he got in, it would only make sense that he’d search for another exit. That he hadn’t found one threw a worrying wrench in the possibility that Belle would be anymore successful. If her father hadn’t found a way out in months, how would she expect to find a way any faster? 

“Two heads are better than one – and four hands are better than two, for that matter,” Belle said, trying to bolster her confidence. It worked, for the most part. She went back to her techpad. “Alright, you’ve found him for me, now let’s see if you can find me a way to where he is.”

She put in a command, asking the techpad to search for any above-ground caves with access down or any other underground openings in the area, and waited while it scanned.

“Spelunker,” Belle said, pausing to take a long, deep breath that she exhaled slowly. “Designation: noun. Definition: a cave explorer, though a real cave explorer would be better prepared than me. I wish I’d thought to at least pack some rope into the shuttle before I left Earth!”

Well, it was too late to scold herself for all the things she didn’t bring with her now. Belle would quite like some excavating equipment, too, but she knew it wasn’t her fault that it hadn’t crossed her mind before she set her course for M49-6822. She’d assumed, wrongly she now knew, that what kept her father stranded would be a problem with his shuttle. There was no way she could have known he was trapped in a cave underground. She’d certainly never heard of anyone ever discovering such a system on any moon before.

“Excavating equipment wouldn’t fit in the shuttle anyway,” she muttered. 

The techpad chirped, its scan done.

Belle read the results and made a satisfied sound at what they told her.

“And I guess I wouldn’t need it even if it did fit.” 

According to the scan, there was an above-ground cave less than three kilometers away with underground access. Considering how interconnected the telemetry showed the cave system on this moon to be, there was a high probability that Belle would be able to reach her father’s location if she descended through whatever opening the cave in question offered. 

Getting down was the easy part, however. Belle wouldn’t know how difficult it would be to get back up until she saw the access point herself. It could be something as simple as a hole in the cave’s ground with a steep drop – easy enough to go down through if she was careful, but not so easy to exit once she was below it. That her father hadn’t been able to leave the cave he was in when he would have access to his own techpad and his own scans of the area which would show him the same thing that Belle’s techpad showed her made that possibility all the more likely. If it was easy to get out through the point in the cave, then surely her father would have done it.

“Rope,” Belle sighed. “Designation: noun. Definition: a strong cord of twisted strands. When we get off this moon, I’ll have to tell dad to keep a length of it in every shuttle. For now...I’ll make do.”

She double checked the directions to the cave before setting off again. Her legs were heavy and her body warm from the exertion of already walking as far as she had, but Belle knew a little more wouldn’t kill her. 

“I’ll take a rest when I get to the cave,” she promised herself. She would need it if she planned to traverse even further beneath its depths.

*

The cave resembled nothing more than a giant lump of coal jutting out of the ground with a large hole in its center. 

As Belle walked towards the cave’s location, she had pessimistically imagined it would have a small opening little bigger than that of a foxhole that she would have to stoop to enter or – at worst – crawl all the way through. The entrance to the cave, however, was taller than Belle was and incredibly wide. Belle stood just in the entrance and stretched her arms out to either side of her and still, her fingers didn’t even come close to brushing against the black stone that made up the sides of the cave’s great mouth. She raised her arms above her head, relishing in the stretch of it, and made no more progress at touching the outer edge of the cave’s roof.

“Well, then,” Belle said, as she unzipped her bag and pulled out her flashlight, “let’s hope it doesn’t get any smaller on the way in.”

Belle clicked on the flashlight, a bright beam of white shooting from its face, and walked slowly into the cave. 

The first few meters of the cave were just as coal-like as the outside was, all smooth black stone walls with just a hint of shine to them. The ground Belle walked on was a black soil that was warm to the touch when she crouched down to feel it and had the coarse consistency of sand. The ground was also, thankfully, flat enough that she had little trouble making her way forward. 

The path was straight for awhile and then gradually began to wind, first to the left and then to the right before going back again, making a snaky sort of course. As the path twisted and turned, Belle became aware that it was also gradually descending. It was barely noticeable until she turned to look back and found that the ground behind her was just slightly higher up than the ground she stood on was.

Belle continued on. She walked that snaking route, wondering all the while if the way down could possibly so easy – and if it was, then why hadn’t her father been able to make his way back up to the surface? She thought that she had been walking for perhaps twenty minutes with no real change in her surroundings before she came to a sudden stop before she could turn another corner in the cave.

There was light and it wasn’t what was coming from her flashlight. A pale, grey light was on the ground, spilling out from around another wind in the cave. It wasn’t as purely bright as what Belle’s flashlight put out, but it was luminous enough to light up the black ground even without the flashlight pointed anywhere near it. 

“Aglow,” Belle muttered as she tentatively began walking forward again. “Designation: adjective. Definition...”

Belle stopped again, her words cutting off just as suddenly as her steps did. Her mouth hanged open in surprise that took her a minute to shake off. 

Once she did, she slowly clicked off her flashlight and held it limply at her side.

“Definition,” Belle said again, awe in her voice, “this.”

On the dark walls of the cave grew a thick scattering of something that would have looked like moss had it not been for the fog grey color of it and the fact that it put out a light that illuminated Belle’s surroundings enough to make her flashlight unnecessary. As far as Belle could see – which, because of the winding nature of the cave’s path, wasn’t more than a few meters in front of her before the path once again bent – the lichen continued along the rest of the cave’s sides. Belle looked up and saw that it ascended to the very ceiling of the cave where it ended before coating the ceiling itself...but where long, sharp-pointed black stalactites grew down instead. 

Those, Belle was positive, hadn’t been there before any more than the lichen had been. She eyed them warily. She didn’t like how precarious they looked just hanging there like that, like they could fall at any moment, but the fact that the ground around her feet was clear of any debris that would suggest that any had ever fallen soothed her worry enough that she managed to tear her eyes away from what was above her. 

Belle looked around her immediate surroundings instead, her lips pursed in thought. The cave was comfortably warm. She had light. There had been no sign of animal life in the cave so far – no insects, no reptiles, no bats or bat-like creatures, and certainly nothing bigger. The ground beneath her feet was solid. 

Assessing herself, however, Belle’s findings weren’t as bright: her legs ached. She was tired. She was thirsty and hungry. Her body, to say nothing of her clothes, was covered in sweat and she felt more than a little filthy because of it.

“Dad wouldn’t want me to run myself ragged,” she said, confident in that appraisal. “Besides, I did promise myself a rest.”

This spot seemed as good as any for that. 

Belle pulled her bag off of her body and crouched down, placing the bag on the ground. She pulled out the replicator and sat it down on the ground next to the bag, then pulled out the cleansiwand and sat that down, too. She rose and began quickly stripping off her clothes – first taking off the techpad on her wrist and placing it carefully on the ground, then slipping off her shoes followed by her shirt and pants. She raised one leg and hopped a bit as she pulled off one sock, then repeated the process with the other. Lastly, she unhooked her bra and let it drop carelessly to the ground and then slipped off her underwear, too.

Belle spared a moment to go back around the corner she had been in before she saw the glowing lichen so that she could relieve herself before she hurried back to the lit area where her things were. There, she picked up the cleansiwand from the ground. 

The device was approximately four centimeters wide and twelve centimeters long. It was mostly white except for a strip up its length that was grey. There were buttons on its face that Belle only needed to tap a few familiar motions into before the grey strip lit up and began to emit a bright blue light. Belle held the glowing end of the cleansiwand close to the right side of her head and slowly began to guide the light down her nude body, feeling the familiar tingle running down her scalp and along her bare skin as all the sweat and dirt and other impurities were efficiently stripped away. 

It took Belle about ten minutes to clean her whole body, ending with her arm stretching uncomfortably behind her as she reached around to get her back. When she was done, she felt as clean as she would had she been scrubbed down in a shower and the absence of the smell of her own sweat didn’t hurt, either. She preceded to crouch back down and repeat the process with her clothes, cleaning them as well. That didn’t take much longer than cleaning her body had and it wasn’t long before Belle was shutting the cleansiwand off, tucking it back into her bag and putting her now fresh clothes back on again.

Once dressed, Belle sat carefully down on the ground and folded her legs beneath her. She pulled her thermos out of her bag and placed it in the center of the replicator – a device that looked like a simple silver square whose sides were about fifteen centimeters long and whose height was about three centimeters thick. She ran her fingers along the device’s side and heard it chirp as it turned on. 

“Water,” she said, her voice loud and clear. The replicator chirped again before her thermos began to be filled with water from the bottom up. When it was full to the brim, the replicator chirped as the filling stopped. Belle picked up her thermos and brought it to her mouth to take a long and satisfying pull before she sat it down at her side. She then took the plate from her bag and put it on the replicator’s surface.

“One energy bar,” she said, and the replicator chirped in reply. A moment later, a large bar made of fruit, nuts, grains, and a blend of nutrient supplements that would give her energy and make her feel full for awhile appeared. It was her favorite treat to have on Earth after working out and she supposed it would work just as well after hiking for kilometers on a moon at the end of the known universe, too. 

Belle removed the plate and put it down next to her water. She put the replicator back in her bag before she picked the bar up and took a bite. She sat there eating and drinking, enjoying the chance to rest her body for the first time in hours. 

Her enjoyment wasn’t as large as it could have been, however. 

As Belle rested, she also used her techpad to scan the underground cave system she found herself in. Now that she had descended quite far down through the winding path of the cave she had entered, she assumed that she was underground enough for the device to give a better picture of the terrain beneath M49-6822’s surface than her shuttle had been able to give her from up high. That assumption was right, but Belle struggled to make any sense of the telemetry she received from the scan.

The data itself was clear enough on its own, removed from the context of why Belle was on the moon to start with. It showed her that the underground cave system was almost entirely interconnected, the image on her techpad looking very similar to a representation of the roots that grew beneath a forest of trees where all the roots, at some place in their reaching tendrils, touched the others. Some of the passages beneath the ground extended on for kilometers and kilometers beneath the moon’s surface and some were barely longer than the length between one end of Belle’s shuttle and the next; some were fairly straight forward for most of their length and some, like the passage Belle was in, snaked their way back and forth for their entirety. The thing they all had in common was that they were part of the same system. No matter how you entered the system, you should be able to traverse to another point in the caves if only you took the right route. 

It meant Belle’s way further down and her way back up to the surface were all but assured. It also made her father’s inability to escape all the more odd, because if the data Belle was looking at was right and if the position of her father’s life sign within the map of the system was right – and they had to be, she knew, because she trusted in the accuracy of her father’s own equipment – then it meant that all her father had to do to get back to the surface would be to backtrack up through the same route Belle had been taking down.

If he had his techpad with him, he would see where the cave Belle had entered from was and he would be able to make his way out of it, but even if his techpad had been somehow lost or damaged, the path from Belle’s life sign to his wasn’t very complicated. It was snaky, yes, but it still only involved walking in a single direction without any cuts through any side passages. Her father would be able to follow it even without the device and he would know he was getting closer to the surface by the increasingly ascending incline of the ground.

Belle again thought of broken legs. She wondered if her father was so injured that it made taking a fairly simple path back to the surface impossible for him, but not so injured that it had killed him or prevented him from seeing to his basic needs so that he could survive for so long. She wondered how such an injury could have occurred when she could see no potential cause for it in her surroundings – no animals who might have hurt him, no loose ground he might have fallen through, no debris he might have tripped over.

She even looked up slowly, suspiciously eyeing the sharp knife-point ends of the stalactites hanging high above her for a moment before she dismissed the thought. If one of those had fallen on her father’s head, she doubted he would still be alive; and if one had fallen and he’d somehow survived it, she still didn’t see how it would have prevented him from walking back to the surface after he recovered enough to do so.

“Mystery,” Belle sighed. “Designation: noun. Definition: an unexplained or unknown thing.”

Belle knew she wouldn’t have an explanation for what had happened to her father and why he hadn’t been able to escape this place and come home on time until she reached him. Only when she saw him for herself and asked him what had happened would she have the answers she so badly needed.

She felt a substantial amount of relief at knowing that it wouldn’t be long now before she had those answers and that whatever had kept her father here, whatever injury it was, wouldn’t be keeping him for much longer.

“I’ll carry you out myself if I have to,” Belle said with determination. “We’re going to get out of here as soon as I find you. I won’t let anything stop me.”

She finished eating her food and drained the last drop of water from her thermos. She put the plate and thermos both back in her bag and zipped it up before she stood and put the bag back on again. Belle spared a moment to stretch, getting the feeling back in her arms and legs again, and then once more began walking closer to her father’s location.

“It won’t be long now, dad,” she promised as she walked. “It won’t be long at all.”

*

As Belle continued on, descending gradually further into the ground, the temperature in the cave began to increase from a spring to summer feel, the stalactites that grew from the ceiling were joined by stalagmites that rose up from the floor and that she would occasionally have to walk around to continue going forward, and she began to pass other paths on either side of the one she was on. 

Some of those paths were so short and narrow that it seemed only a child might be able to pass through them – and barely, at that – and some were so tall and wide that they seemed to be hallways built for giants. Off down some of those paths, Belle could even hear the light sound of water running, and though that piqued her curiosity, she knew better than to stray from her intended course. 

All along the way, the glowing lichen continued to cover the cave’s walls, making Belle’s flashlight little more than an extra bit of weight in her bag. On her techpad, she could easily see the distance between the red dot that represented her life sign and the green dot of her father’s begin to slowly close. Belle’s breath caught in her throat every time she lifted her wrist to look at it and a frisson of excitement began to grow in her chest that only increased as the distance between she and her father lessened. 

Belle was perhaps a kilometer away from her father’s location when she first saw signs of something strange. 

All the paths she began to pass started to look eerily identical. Their mouths were all perfectly rounded, all of them were exactly the same height, approximately three meters high, and all of them seemed to only extend about four meters in until they ended abruptly at a perfectly smooth black wall. The strangest thing about them wasn’t even that, however, but the fact that the mouth of every single one of these paths was blocked by what Belle could only describe as bars – stalactites that descended from the top of the paths’ entrances and grew down into stalagmites that ascended up from the floor. The bars these growths made were so close together, Belle would have only been able to slide an arm through them.

The picture they made reminded her of prison cells. 

Belle had seen occasional images in the news feeds of prisons that the ESS kept on the moons of other planets in the Milky Way and these ‘cells’ in M49-6822’s caves seemed very similar. The only difference was that the ESS cells had bars that were clearly human made out of steel and other metals that didn’t match those moons’ natural aesthetic, and those bars could be opened or closed by using a locking mechanism that was visible on the front of them so that prisoners could come and go as was necessary.

There was no such locking mechanism on these stalatist bars and they were obviously naturally formed. Belle could look at them warily and be discomforted by the uniformity of their design that seemed almost purposeful in its aesthetics, but she had to acknowledge that such uniformity wasn’t such a strange thing in nature – no matter what planet or moon’s nature one was thinking of. Plenty of animals and plants and even rock formations on Earth had the same kind of symmetry to them, but they didn’t strike her as strange because she was used to them and her mind read them as normal. Likewise, plenty of things on Earth looked similar to other things, but that didn’t mean the similarity was anything other than her human brain comparing two images it had stored and making connections that only existed within the synapses of the brain itself.

Still, though…

“Creepy,” Belle muttered as she passed by one ‘cell’ after another. “Designation: adjective. Definition: anything that exudes a similar feeling to that which comes from a weird rock prison in the bowels of a moon at the far end of human explored space.”

She tried to ignore the feeling as she went on, but it was difficult to ignore entirely when the cells themselves continued in their regularly spaced uniformity on either side of her with seemingly no end to them. Belle couldn’t quite manage to feel comfortable as she kept passing them by nor could she stop her eyes from darting from right to left to look at them as she did so. It was as though a part of her mind was so wary it needed to keep each of those strange little barred spaces in her sight, like it thought something awful might jump out of one of them despite the bars if she didn’t keep a watchful eye on the things.

It was because of that guarded observation that Belle happened to spot her father just seconds before her techpad alerted her that she’d reached his location. 

Belle didn’t realize it was her father at first or even a human being at all. She had been looking at the cells as she walked, glancing at their black bars and the empty space behind them that ended at a black wall. She looked to the right and it was the same, then the left, then the right again...and then she turned her head and stopped suddenly because the next cell to the left had something in it. Some white heap that immediately caught her eye in the otherwise pure black space. 

It took Belle a moment to see that the whiteness she saw was, in fact, clothing and that it wasn’t actually all that white, but was rather filthy instead.

It took another moment to see that the clothing was hanging loosely off the form of a person who was sitting with their back to the black cave wall, their legs pulled up to their chest and their arms wrapped around them with their forehead pressed to their knees and nothing but a shock of lank and greasy grey hair atop their head visible. 

And it took only a second longer for Belle to realize she recognized that hair and the clothing both, the latter of which had been much cleaner and much more well-fitting the last time she saw it – on her father’s body the day he left Earth.

Belle inhaled sharply, the sound a jagged glass shard of noise in the otherwise silent underground. She blinked several times at the image she was seeing as if it might suddenly disappear, but the picture remained: the emaciated form of a man huddled against the wall of the cell wearing filthy but familiar clothes and baring a filthy but familiar head.

“Dad?” she whispered in disbelief. 

The form in the cell shifted at hearing her voice and raised its head. A louder, more startled sound escaped Belle’s throat when she saw the face looking back at her and knew it to be a face that she knew as well as her own. Belle would recognize her father anywhere, no matter how much time had passed...and no matter how unwell he obviously was, such as he looked now. 

His eyes, the same hazel as Belle’s and usually sparkling with life, were glazed and bloodshot. His usually clean-shaven face was marred with an unkempt beard. He had a bone-deep tiredness about him that Belle had never seen on her father before, not even when he was withdrawn and depressed like on the anniversary of her mother’s death as he was every year. He looked like he’d aged much more than just the months he’d been gone. He looked like he’d aged decades if not centuries, an aging on the soul so great that it made itself visible on the body as well. 

He looked at Belle wearily and with no small amount of confusion. He blinked at her the way she’d blinked at the cell he was in when she first caught sight of him, like she was some figment of his imagination that would dissipate as easily as smoke in the wind.

But Belle didn’t dissipate. She remained frozen in place, more aware of the solidity of her own body than she had ever been, with something like a stone caught in her throat at the surprise of seeing her father where he was and at the sense of painful wrongness she felt at seeing the state he was in.

She could tell the exact moment her father realized she wasn’t just some waking dream or hallucination, because his eyes widened and his head reared back as if he’d been hit. The movement was enough to snap Belle out of her own daze. She cried out again and within seconds she was hurtling herself across the distance between her and the bars of her father’s cell. She fell to her knees on the ground in front of it and wrapped her hands around the bars until her fists were white-knuckled.

“Dad!” Belle cried, her heart pounding in her chest. “Dad...”

“Belle?” her father whispered, his voice as dry and scratchy as sandpaper. He looked at her in disbelief for another second and then he lurched forward suddenly and nearly face-planted on the floor with the movement. He managed to right himself and crawl towards the bars and made it, coming so close that Belle could see in vivid detail how unwell he really looked. His hands were dry as they touched her hands, gently at first like he was checking to make sure she was actually there, then more firmly until he was clinging to her, but his grip was still remarkably weak and Belle could only blame her father’s obviously deteriorated state on his lack of strength. “Belle...what...how...”

Belle sobbed. Her throat was painfully tight with emotion and she struggled to speak through it. “You’ve been missing for months, dad! You didn’t come home when you were supposed to and I tried to get the ESS to help, but –“

“Those bastards wouldn’t piss on a man if he was on fire unless they got paid a ransom for it,” he said distractedly, a familiar refrain that had Belle letting out a watery laugh despite herself.

“I came to rescue you,” she told him. “I thought your shuttle had malfunctioned or – or something. I didn’t expect to find you like...” She looked around her, at the darkness of the cave only illuminated by glowing lichen, at the cell her father was trapped in and the bars blocking him from leaving it. “Like this. How did this happen? How did you get trapped in there? I can barely get my hand through these bars and you...you look like you’ve been in there all this time! You haven’t, have you? Tell me you haven’t!”

Belle’s father opened his mouth to respond, but suddenly stopped. His whole expression seemed to freeze for a moment before it went deathly pale, as if all the blood had all of a sudden leeched out of his face.

He pressed himself closer to the bars until his body was smashed up against them and his hands tightened on hers as much as they were able to. 

“Belle, you have to get out of here.”

“We’re going to get out of here soon,” she rushed to promise him. “As soon as I can find a way to break these bars –“

“No!” her father hissed, interrupting her. “No, Belle, not us. You need to get out of here now. Get out of these caves and get off of this moon as fast as you can!”

Belle’s head reared back, her mind barely processing the words. Once she realized what her father was suggesting she shook her head rapidly in denial. “No, dad! No! What are you talking about, I can’t ---”

“You have to,” he urged her. His eyes darted from left to right before settling back on Belle’s face. “Belle, we’re not alone here.”

“Dad...dad, you’re not making any sense!”

He made an impatient sound like a curse not given voice and shut his eyes tightly. 

“There’s a creature on this moon, Belle,” he grit out, sounding pained as he said it.

“An animal? My scans picked up animal life, but couldn’t identify it...but I haven’t seen –“

“Not an animal, Belle,” her father interrupted again. His eyes snapped open and there was a wild look about them that frightened Belle as he shook his head. “A beast, a horrible monster. It isn’t normal, do you understand? It isn’t like any animal that’s ever been discovered outside of Earth before.”

Belle swallowed hard. The look in her father’s eye, what he was saying...the way he sounded.

“Dad…” she tried, but her mouth went dry before she could continue. She didn’t have a clue what to say. She didn’t know what she could say to her father when he looked so panicked and she was suddenly confronted with the possibility that he’d somehow lost his mind in the months he’d been on this moon.

Her father was still observant, though. Something of Belle’s thoughts must have showed on her face because her father insisted with frank urgency, “I know what I must sound like to you, Belle, but believe me! I didn’t get trapped in here through some sort of freak accident. That thing put me in here. It did something to the bars and they lifted, then it threw me in and did something else and they closed. I saw it take the equipment out of my bag and fiddle with it to figure out how to use it – and it did learn, just as quickly as a human would. Faster than a human would. When I finally got so desperately thirsty that I screamed at the thing that I needed water, it...fed me. It’s done other things to me, too...experiments...”

It all sounded far too horrifying – and far too outlandish – for Belle to comprehend. She pressed him, “What kind of experiments? What do you mean? What did this...thing do to you?” 

Her father’s pallid face burned red at the question. 

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said shortly. He then added with obvious effort going into every word, “But it ended quickly enough. It tried...something for a few days, but I think it found me an unsuitable subject for what it wanted. The experiments didn’t work and so it stopped trying and it’s only been back to feed me enough to keep me alive since, but Belle...I don’t think it will find you nearly so unsuitable. You need to get out of here and get out of here fast before that thing realizes you’re here and you end up in one of these cells just like I am.” 

“Dad –“ Belle shook her head and for some reason laughed, though she found nothing at all amusing about the current situation. “Dad, do you understand what you’re telling me? What you’re describing is...it’s intelligent life! Intelligent life that isn’t human!”

“What I’m describing is a threat to our lives, Belle!” her father hissed, struggling to keep his voice low. “To your life. You need to leave. You need to get back to your shuttle and get back to Earth and as soon as my claim to this moon is approved, I want you you access my funds and pay for this whole place to be demolitioned as soon as possible. It doesn’t matter if it takes every credit I have saved, just get this whole place destroyed.”

“While you’re still here?” Belle demanded, aghast. “You want me to not only leave you imprisoned here, but to pay someone to come back and kill you? No! No, I won’t do it!”

“Belle, you don’t understand,” her father was pleading. “If that thing can learn how to use a replicator or a stunner or a techpad within minutes of picking them up, how long will it take it to learn how to use a shuttle? How long until it figures out how to get to Earth? It knows humans exist now, it knows there are more subjects for its experiments out there. This isn’t just about my life or your life here, that thing cannot be allowed to leave this moon. It can’t be allowed to live. Now, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I would likely die here already, so –“

“But I haven’t!” Belle shouted. At seeing the fearful widening of her father’s eyes and the way he once again darted them around, she forced herself to take a deep breath and lower her voice. “I haven’t come to terms with anything but getting you off this moon and taking you home where you belong. If after we leave you still want to have this place demolitioned, then you can do that, but it will be you accessing the funds and putting your own signature on the order. I won’t leave here without you and I sure as hell won’t have anything to do with destroying this moon while you’re still on it, creature or no creature. You can’t make me do that. You can’t possibly try to force me to make that kind of decision.”

“Belle –“ her father tried, his tone desperate.

“No, dad,” she interrupted him this time, taking her hands off the cell’s bars and away from her father. She refused to acknowledge the pang she felt at how his fingers flexed in surprise at the loss of her touch, focusing instead on immediately taking off her bag and taking a forceful hold of its strap, an idea for how to bring those bars down racing through her mind.

Belle pulled the strap on her bag with sudden force that had it snapping off the bag itself, the places where it had been sewed into the bag ripping their stitches with violence. She stood and wrapped her hand around the bar farthest to the left and pulled at it at the top then moved down to the middle and the bottom. She moved down the line off them, testing their strength until she’d determined that they were all weaker in the middle section where stalactite met stalagmite. That was good. That was exactly what Belle hoped for.

She took the strap and wrapped a portion of it around the first of the bars while her hands gripped either end of it, so that it resembled a scarf wrapped around an incredibly skinny neck that someone else was using to strangle the neck’s owner with.

“Belle, you’re wasting your time!” her father quietly urged her. “Belle...Belle, please!”

Belle bit harshly down on her bottom lip to stay whatever response she might have given and focused on her task instead. She braced her feet on the ground and with all her strength, pulled at the strap. At first, the bar didn’t give at all. It felt immovable and impossibly strong and Belle could feel the strain in her arms as she pulled. She relaxed her grip for a moment and took a deep breath, then started pulling again. She counted to five, then relaxed for another moment before resuming once more. 

Belle repeated this a few times until finally she began to feel some give in the bar. She repeated it a few more times and the give increased until finally she heard a crack and nearly stumbled back as the bar broke and the bottom half of it snapped off and fell to the ground. It left behind a space large enough to stick an arm through, though not much else, but it was a start. 

Belle’s father inhaled so sharply the sound was audible, but to Belle he seemed more paranoid that the creature he had described might have heard the sound of the bar breaking than he was excited about the possibility of escape. He was more wide-eyed than ever and other than the gasp, silent. He knelt just meters outside of the bars, a fearful and frail looking shadow of the strong and daring man Belle had always known.

She had to force herself not to look at him, to almost pretend he wasn’t even there. She focused on her work instead, determined to worry about nothing but removing enough bars so that her father could get out. She hated to think it, but she was almost grateful he was so thin now. It meant it wouldn’t be as hard for him to squeeze through a smaller opening as it would have been had he still had the body he had when he left Earth. In a horrible way, it made Belle’s task a little easier.

The task itself was difficult enough that Belle needed all the help she could get. It was tiring even to someone who was in shape and the harder Belle worked at it, the more her muscles were affected. It meant every bar she worked on was more difficult to remove than the last. Belle’s heart was steadily pounding and perspiration dripped down her as she managed to remove a second bar and then a third. 

The space she opened up was almost big enough for her father to get through and Belle’s anticipation grew in her at knowing it would soon be large enough in actuality.

“Just one more,” she panted. Her father looked frozen, a deer in headlights at the news. “Just one more, dad, and then you’re out of there.”

She began working on the fourth bar, gritting her teeth at how raw her palms were from all the pulling she’d been doing and how the strap continued to bite into her skin every time she pulled now. Her shoulders ached and her arms were leaden, but Belle couldn’t let the pain stop her. Not now. Not when she was so close.

She nearly sobbed when she felt the first bit of give in the fourth bar and her strength felt renewed by triumph as she continued to pull the strap around it. The give increased as she worked, the bar began to creak, and after what felt like an eternity, it finally cracked and broke, the lower half of the bar falling to the ground with the rest she’d pulled down.

Belle dropped the strap, breathing heavily. She was exhausted and aching, but smiling in spite of it. She laughed breathlessly at her success, but the sound died quickly when she saw her father still huddled in the cell looking frightened and still.

“Dad,” Belle called and was thankful that her father was at least cognizant enough to turn his head and look at her. “Dad, come on!”

When he only blinked at her, unmoving, Belle had to stamp down on the instant stab of impatience that rose up in her chest about it. She knew it wasn’t right for her to be irritated, that she needed to be patient with him. She didn’t know what all her father had been through in his months on M49-6822, but from how he acted and the things he said, Belle knew that it had taken its toll. If the things he said about this creature he claimed had imprisoned him were true – and though Belle hated to disbelieve her father, she struggled to understand how they could be – then the horror he’d experienced was insurmountable. And if what her father said wasn’t true...he wouldn’t lie to Belle willfully. If he said there was a creature on the moon, he genuinely believed it. It must have meant he was deluded, driven mad by his months of being alone. 

Either way, Belle needed to get them both out of here, sooner rather than later. If there really was some creature on this moon who meant them harm, the sooner they got back to the shuttle and back to Earth, the better – and if her father was delusional, if he was suffering from some captivity induced mental ailment, then the sooner he could get back to Earth and get the help he needed to be well again, all the better for that, too.

“Dad,” Belle tried more gently. “Dad, you need to get out of there, okay? You said there was some...thing here, right? Shouldn’t we go before it gets back?”

For a moment, Belle’s father remained frozen and she began to worry that she might actually have to crawl into the cell herself and drag him out. Then finally, he seemed to shake himself from his stupor. He took in a sharp inhale and nodded stiffly. 

“You’re right, of course,” he said brusquely. “We need to leave now. God only knows how it hasn’t heard you yet, girl, with all that damn noise you made!”

Belle was stung at the admonishment, but forced herself to be satisfied with the fact that her father was at least complying. He hurried to make his way to the opening she’d made and began to crawl his way out. It was an easier task than Belle thought it would be. Her father had apparently lost more weight than she’d been able to tell before. She realized with an ache of discomfort that his clothing had hidden the true extent of his emaciation. It took little work at all for his lank form to get through the open space.

Once he was out, he pushed himself to his feet, stumbling as he did. Belle darted towards him quickly to steady him with a hand on his upper arm and he righted himself quickly enough, leaving Belle standing there still holding him, her breath caught in her throat at the fact that she had done what she set out to do – she had rescued her dad.

Belle had imagined the moment she would reunite with her father a thousand times both before and during her voyage to M49-6822. She imagined how happy she would be and how happy he would be to see her in turn. She thought that they would embrace, her father’s arms wrapping around her tight, and that suddenly everything would feel right in the universe again. She thought of them, in every one of her imaginings, walking arm and arm to her shuttle together where they would go back to Earth and live happily ever after, with all this business gradually fading into nothing more than a memory.

Other than finding her father alive, nothing else was going anything like Belle had imagined. The man in front of her now bore only the most superficial resemblance to the man she remembered, both physically and in terms of personality. He didn’t look at all happy to see her, either, much less happy enough to give her a hug. Instead, he looked frenzied and manic, a man hanging off the edge of sanity, who perhaps had fallen already.

Rather than exchanging loving words with her or even telling her she had done a good job with the bars, Belle’s father demanded, “Do you have your techpad?”

“I – yes,” Belle answered. The question confused her, but she found herself automatically undoing the band of the device at her wrist anyway and holding it out to him. Her father all but snatched it out of her hands and began flicking at the screen immediately. 

“You parked your shuttle next to mine,” he muttered, and Belle could tell instantly he wasn’t talking to her at all. “That’s good...it means it will be easier to destroy...”

“Destroy?” Belle blurted. Her father’s eyes shot up to look at her and Belle struggled not to feel slighted at how surprised he looked at seeing she was still there. “Dad, why –“

“If we leave one of the shuttles here, the creature might find its way to it,” he explained with obvious impatience, “and God help us if that thing learns how to fly!”

“Dad, listen to yourself!” Belle pleaded. “You’ve told me yourself plenty about how expensive those shuttles are to make. All the work that went into them, all the equipment –“

“Damn it, Belle, forget about the cost! What I’m talking about is more important than –“

He stopped suddenly, mid-sentence, as if all the rest of the words he was about to say had been sucked right out of him. His face paled worse than before until it looked so cadaverous and waxen that Belle was terrified that he was having a stroke. He remained upright, however, and showed no signs of pain. Just shock – shock and fear.

“Dad? Dad, what is it?”

“Don’t get near her!” he yelled so loudly that it made Belle jump. “Stay back!”

“Dad –“

Her father let out a roaring cry and before Belle could even think to stop him, he was darting forward and ripping the stunner out of the holster at her side and raising it. Belle was sure her heart had stopped beating for a moment, terrified that her own father was about to shoot her, before she saw he was aiming over her shoulder instead of right at her. She spun around the same instant that her father pulled the trigger, just in time to see the green blast of energy go past and hit – 

hit – 

_...that!_

Belle let out a startled noise at the thing that was before her, just meters away. Thing was the only way to describe it because Belle knew of no creature on Earth that looked anything like this one, no other species that she could compare it to. It was a large, writhing mass of glossy black tentacles that spouted from it on all sides, the ones extending from its bottom half pulsating and keeping it constantly in motion, up and down and up and down, like a person might bounce on their feet. The thing towered above her and had such a massive girth that it took up most of the width of the passageway. 

And in the center of it…

In the center was an eye. A single diamond shaped eye that must have been twice the size of one of Belle’s hands. It had an iris the color of the silver sky Belle first saw when she landed on the moon and a large, cat-like pupil. As Belle stared at the creature, it blinked slowly back at her, its eyelid closing from left to right instead of top to bottom, and something about the motion made her sick to her stomach. 

The energy from the stunner hit the creature and it reared back suddenly, letting out a shrill, earsplitting sound that had Belle crying out in pain and slapping her hands to her ears to try to block it out. Ice pick sharp pain stabbed at her ears and tears sprung up in her eyes from the agony of it, but even through the tears Belle could see that the stunner had done nothing to incapacitate the creature at all. Rather, it looked angry – its single eye squinting and pupil narrowed, its tentacles lashing about as a cat might lash its tail after it had been stepped on – and that anger, Belle saw, was directed entirely over her shoulder at her father who still stood behind her. 

The creature made to move forward and before Belle knew it, she was stepping forward herself and throwing out her arms, a shout of “No!” escaping her lips. 

“Belle!” her father hissed behind her, but all of Belle’s attention was on the creature which had stopped coming forward and was now looking down at her curiously. 

Belle remembered what her father had said then about the creature being able to figure out how to use his equipment and how it had fed him when he told it that he needed food. That suggested not only intelligence, but the ability to communicate. She hoped that suggestion was right, because she didn’t know what they’d do if it wasn’t.

Belle swallowed hard and maintained eye contact with the thing. She kept her voice low, using the tone she’d used before on Earth to speak to other wild animals, and lowered her arms until her hands were held palms forward in front of her in a universal sign of peace that she hoped was actually universal. 

“Please,” she said slowly. “Please don’t hurt my father.”

The creature did its slow blink again and nothing else. 

Belle didn’t know what to make of it, but she hoped it meant the creature was listening. She continued on in the same gentling voice, “He’s been here for long enough, hasn’t he? And – and he’s not of any use to you, either, is he? He told me you tried to do some...experiment with him and it didn’t work and so you stopped trying. I appreciate that you’ve kept him alive anyway, but...but you don’t need him here, do you? Wouldn’t it be easier – easier for you that is – if you just let him leave and go home?”

The creature made no reaction. It just remained in place, its tentacles moving in a constant but relaxed motion. 

Belle turned her head enough so that she could see her father’s wide and terrified eyes which were still glued to the creature. 

“Dad, back up a few steps.”

His eyes darted to hers. He looked entirely aghast at her suggestion and Belle’s mouth twisted in annoyance.

“Just a few steps, please,” she implored him. “Just – just try.”

Her father looked no more pleased with the idea of the plan, but he did what Belle said. He took one stiff step backwards and then another. Belle turned her head back around to quickly look at the creature’s reaction, but it still had none. It seemed unbothered by the fact that her father was apparently leaving. Its eye stayed on Belle even as Belle heard her father continuing to slowly retreat behind her. 

“We’re going back to the shuttle,” Belle said, to her father and the creature both. “We’re sorry we came to your home and we’ll make sure no one else does after we leave, but right now we have to –“

Belle made to take a step backwards to retreat with her father and it was then that suddenly the creature’s disposition changed. It let out another earsplitting sound and its mass seemed to expand with anger again. Faster than Belle could comprehend, one of its tentacles was snapping out and wrapping around her ankle. It yanked and Belle screamed as her legs were pulled out from under her. She landed painfully on her tailbone before that tentacle dragged her forward into the writhing mass of the creature it belonged to. 

Through the pain in her ears and the loud pounding of her heartbeat, Belle heard her father shouting her name, his voice laden with terror.

“Just go!” she screamed at him. 

“Belle!”

Belle managed to twist herself onto her belly as the creature’s writing tentacles covered her, trying to drag her beneath its form. Her nails dug painfully into the ground, trying to get a grip to crawl away with to no avail, as she raised her head and met her father’s terrified eyes. 

“Go!” she screamed again and when he made no move, she let out a cry filled with frustration and panic. “Get out of here, dad! Get back to the shuttle and fucking go! Do it now!”

Her father remained frozen for a second longer, a look of anguish on his face, before he seemed to finally come to a decision. 

The last thing Belle saw before the squirming tentacles succeeded in pulling her entire body beneath them and their slick black weight wrapped around her head and obscured her vision entirely was her father’s back as he turned and ran away. Seconds later, one thick tentacle wrapped around her throat and began squeezing, cutting off Belle’s breath. It didn’t take long after that for Belle to succumb and lose consciousness entirely.

*

Belle woke up coughing, her hand automatically going to her throat to clasp it only to pull back as if burned when the tender skin there twinged with pain at the touch. Her eyes were dry when she opened them, blinking about confusedly. Her breathing was still struggling to even out as she pushed herself up and managed to get into a more upright, sitting position. 

Once she got her breathing under control, she realized she could feel warm, smooth stone against her palms and the rest of her skin – too much of her skin. Belle looked down at herself and was startled when she saw that her clothes were gone. No pants, no shirt, no underwear or bra. She didn’t even have on her socks anymore. She was entirely nude, the paleness of her skin almost obscenely vivid against the pitch black of the stone floor she was sitting on. She took stock of her body and found that in addition to her sore throat, there was a band of bruised skin around one ankle and her fingernails were torn and ragged with dried blood painting vertical lines on her fingers in the crevices where nail met skin. 

Her heart thumped at the sight of the damage, but Belle forced herself to swallow down her unease. There were no other injuries that she could see on her body and so she turned her attention to her surroundings instead. 

There was nothing but blackness around her with the grey illumination of the glowing lichen on the walls giving it all shape. A black stone floor was beneath her, onyx walls on three sides of her, and a high rounded dome of black ceiling above her head...and then across from her, there were bars. Black stalagmites growing into stalactites. The same kind of bars that had kept her father imprisoned in a cell just like this, but these bars were all intact and, if anything, looked even thicker and stronger than the ones that had been in front of her father’s cell.

...Her father. God, how could she have forgotten about him for even a minute?

“He made it out,” Belle reassured herself, even as despair had her stomach plummeting in her gut. “He got out and made it to the shuttle. He’s on his way back to Earth right now. I did what I came to do. I saved him, I –“

She stopped, swallowing down the sudden sob that rose up in her throat, and bit brutally down on her bottom lip. She brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, inhaling a deep, ragged breath as she stared at the bars to her cell trying to imagine what her father had thought when he first opened his eyes and saw the same sight all those months ago. 

Had he been able to conceive of how long he would be imprisoned here? Had he thought from the start that he would die on this moon or had that only come later? Would she herself eventually feel that way? Was anyone going to save her? Would her father, after all he’d been through and how he’d changed, even consider her worth saving or would he go through with his plan to have the moon destroyed as soon as he got back to Earth? Would he think Belle was better off dead so long as the creature died, too, the way he’d thought so about himself?

“Prisoner,” Belle said, her voice small as she tested the word out. “Designation: noun. Definition: a person who has been unwillingly confined.”

When Belle had first set out for M49-6822 weeks ago she’d never imagined that she would rescue her father only to end up taking his place. She hadn’t been able to imagine what it was that had kept him on the moon at all – the idea that it had been something as simple as a shuttle malfunction seemed so silly now, so stupid, such a naive assumption in the face of reality.

Belle thought back to the first sight she had of that strange tentacled creature that had kept her father prisoner, how large it was and how quick it was to anger and how fast it could move. She moved one hand down her leg until it was pressing down on the band of bruised skin around her ankle and she shivered as she recalled how the creature had struck out and jerked her towards it so quickly and with so much strength when it saw that she was about to leave. 

Now, here Belle was at its mercy and she didn’t even know why. What could the thing want with her that it couldn’t do with her father? He had told her that it had performed experiments on him – or tried to, at least. He’d said the creature found him an unsuitable candidate, but that he thought it might think otherwise of Belle, and Belle couldn’t figure out what he meant no matter how she replayed her father’s words in her mind and analyzed every piece. 

“I thought he’d gone crazy,” she whispered, then laughed softly and without humor. 

She felt foolish for it now. Foolish and guilty. She should have listened to him when he first told her of the creature. She should have believed him and known he was telling the truth. More than that, she should have done what he told her to do, then maybe...but no, Belle couldn’t have left without him. She didn’t come all this way just to leave her father rotting for another few months if not longer, much less to have the moon blown up with her father still on it as he’d suggested she should do.

Belle refused to acknowledge the pain she felt at the fact that her father had been willing to leave her himself. Feeling betrayed by him...that was another foolish notion.

“I told him to leave,” she reminded herself, hugging her arms more tightly around her legs. “He only did what I told him to do. I don’t have the right to feel like he’s done something wrong to me for just doing what I said.”

Belle wondered how often she’d have to tell herself that before she believed it.

“Lucky me,” she said bitterly, “I have all the time in the universe to find out.”

*

Belle couldn’t keep up with the passage of time. Seconds could have passed or minutes or hours and the glowing light given off by the lichen never changed. There was nothing around her to mark the time with other than counting out the seconds in her head and Belle’s mind couldn’t keep that up for more than a few minutes before the constant repetition of numbers started to drive her mad. 

She only knew that after awhile, she began to get thirsty and tired, as well as terribly bored. She would get up and pace the confines of her cell looking for some way out – studying the bars and pulling on them and feeling not the slightest bit of give to the things no matter how rough she was with them – only to sit back down in frustration when she found nothing. She would only end up feeling more tired than before from expending her strength trying to get the bars to break and though Belle tried to stay awake, she found herself nodding off and then jolting back into wakefulness an undetermined amount of time later anyway, having no idea how long she’d managed to close her eyes.

Time seemed to pass very slowly and very quickly all at once. At some points, Belle was positive that hours had passed and then at others, she thought it had only been a few minutes. Always, she was alert for any sounds that might indicate the creature was near and would come to do whatever it was planning on doing with her, but the silence in the cell and the space outside of it remained deafening.

It didn’t take long before Belle found herself thinking that it was no wonder her father had been so changed from how he was when she’d said goodbye to him on Earth so many months ago. Being in the cell was much worse than being in her shuttle was and she’d only been there for a short time. Her father had spent months trapped in such a place. Even though he was telling the truth about the creature, Belle wondered if he might not have gone a little mad in his confinement after all. She felt like she was going mad herself already and the thought that she might be stuck in this cell for months on end the same as her father had...it wasn’t exactly an idea that inspired rationality in a person.

When the creature finally came for her, Belle was almost relieved that finally something was interrupting the monotony, but her relief didn’t last long.

Her first sign that something was happening was a sound like leaves rustling in the wind. The silence in the cell was so absolute that Belle’s ears picked up on the noise when it was just a hint of sound. It was so faint at first that she thought that she was imagining it, but soon it became clear that it wasn’t her imagination at all. The sound got louder, almost whisper-like, as it came from down the hall outside the cell, clearly heading in her direction. 

Belle stood and braced herself for whatever was coming, but she was still startled when the empty space outside the cell bars were suddenly filled by the creature’s undulating form.

Her second look at it shocked her no less than the first. The creature looked no more normal to her, its movements no less strange, its single eye no less disturbing and the way it looked at Belle no more comfortable. If anything, the thing looked even more strange than the first time she saw it.

Belle wanted to say that the creature looked like something out of one of those horror movies about extraterrestrial life that often got adapted from the kind of books she didn’t care to read, like some fictional monster come to life out of an actor in a costume and special effects that made it look so real on screen, but she couldn’t. The most unnerving thing about the creature now standing just a few meters away from Belle was how unreal it looked. If she had seen it on a screen in a theater that one of her friends dragged her to, she would have thought it looked too fake to be believed. She would have blamed the fakeness on a poor movie budget and had fun looking the thing over for a zipper that showed the monster for the costume covering the actor that she knew it to be. 

The problem was that this wasn’t a movie theater. The creature wasn’t on a screen and there was no zipper on it that would open up into something less inhuman no matter how hard Belle looked. The fact that Belle wanted to look, that she felt like there should have been a zipper going up the creature’s side even though she knew that there wasn’t one only made the thing more disturbing. 

A real monster should look real, shouldn’t it? Belle thought it should, but the longer she looked, the more unreal the thing became in her eyes and the more surreal the entire situation felt.

For a long moment, nothing happened. 

Belle only stared at the creature through the gaps of the bars of her prison and the creature’s one eye stared back at her. Belle made herself hold its gaze, keeping her chin up and her back straight and her breathing even, although internally her mind was racing. 

She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know how she was supposed to behave. Outside of a few jokes the professor of the interplanetary survival course she had taken years ago had shared on occasion about what one might do if they came face to face with an alien, none of the courses she’d taken in preparation for travel outside of Earth had seriously prepared her for actually encountering sentient alien life. Animals, yes, but not anything that had the ability to understand human communication or – if Belle’s father was correct – use human technology.

Her professor had always said that the best way to deal with a wild animal on any planet was to avoid encountering them in the first place and when avoiding them wasn’t possible, then the second best course of action was to not show fear. Predators, he’d told Belle’s class, could sense fear. They had instincts which could take in your scent and the way you breathed and how you held yourself at a glance and know where you were on the food chain in relation to them just as quickly.

Belle didn’t know if the creature she was looking at counted as an animal or a predator, but as her old professor’s advice was all the guidance she had, she held on to it. She tried to project calm, to not seem ruffled, to not look afraid. If this creature was capable of analytical thinking, Belle didn’t want it to see her as a threat and respond accordingly. If it was a predator, she desperately did not want it to think of her as its prey.

Belle tried her best, but she still couldn’t stop her shudder when the thing blinked at her in that side to side way it had or the nausea that turned her stomach sour at the sight of it. It was a relief when the creature turned its own sight away away from her and directed its eye to a place on the wall outside of Belle’s cell. 

Her relief, however, was replaced with confusion when the creature raised one of its tentacles and began poking at...something.

Belle frowned as she watched it, her mind racing to figure out what it was doing. She had been preoccupied with her father when she came to this place in the cave system, but she was observant enough to know that there was nothing outside of the cell she was trapped in but blank black walls with lichen high at the top giving the passageway illumination and more cells going down the way – and yet, the creature’s tentacle poked and swiped at what should have been nothing, its attention fully on its task.

Somehow, the motions were familiar to Belle even though the creature making them and the appendage it was making them with were as far from familiar as they could get. The movements, though, they reminded her of how her own fingers moved across the screen of her techpad to input commands. The same poking, the same swiping – but, of course, Belle knew the comparison had to be ridiculous. There was nothing outside of her cell except for empty wall space made out of whatever stone composed these caves. If there were some sort of technology here, not just underground but on M49-6822 at all, then Belle was certain she would have seen some sign of it, but there had been nothing to suggest this moon held any kind of technology save for what Belle and her father had brought with them.

A loud clanking noise suddenly sounded and Belle startled at it. She looked around her cell for the source of the noise, but she saw nothing that could have caused it. She barely held back a second flinch when her eyes returned to the creature and she found it right in front of the bars, its eye back on her, looking almost as if it were waiting on something.

Belle didn’t understand what until the bars began to move.

At first, she didn’t know what she was seeing. Her wary attention was focused on looking at the creature when something in the center of the bars where stalactite met stalagmite seemed to almost shimmer in the air, like a heat mirage might make one’s vision distort if they were standing on an asphalt road on a hot day. Belle’s eyes were immediately drawn to the space and her gaze could only stay there, staring in disbelief, as the middle portion of the bars almost seemed to melt. 

They thinned out, black ore dripping down into stalagmite and oozing up into the stalactite until the center of the bars had disappeared and the stalagmite and stalactite no longer touched but rather had a line of empty space between them all across the bars. Then rapidly, the stalagmite continued to descend into the ground while the stalactite rose up into the ceiling until finally the bars were gone and there was no evidence in the floor whatsoever that anything had ever grown out of it to begin with.

Belle’s disbelief lasted only for the span of a few breaths before the reality of what had happened – of the bars being gone – sunk in. She inhaled sharply, fear spiking in her chest, as she tore here eyes away from the smooth, unblemished floor where the stalagmite had once rose up from and focused on the creature again instead.

The creature, who Belle could now see clearly for there were no bars hiding its form from her. 

The creature, who now had nothing keeping it from getting to Belle.

The creature, who began to move forward.

Belle took a stumbling step back before she could stop herself and her panic kept her moving as the creature advanced, all plans of not showing her fear fleeing her as her feet propelled her backwards so quickly it was a wonder she didn’t trip over them and fall. Finally, however, there was nowhere else for Belle to go. Her back hit the wall. The cool stone pressed flush against her bare skin and her knuckles went white as her palms pressed back against it, as though if she just pushed hard enough she could sink backwards and escape through solid rock just as easily as the stalagmite bars had sank into the floor.

But Belle didn’t sink back. 

Instead, she remained against the wall like a cornered animal, sucking in sharp, fearful breaths as her heart pounded in her chest and the creature closed the distance between them. By the time Belle thought to look at over the creature’s body to the now empty space where the bars used to be and even consider trying to make a run for it, it was too late. The creature was upon her and Belle’s ankle still twinged with the bruises it had left the last time she tried to get away from it. She had no doubt that in these close quarters, she would be even less successful if she tried to escape again.

The thing stopped so close to Belle that the tips of its tentacles brushed her skin as they moved cold and wet against her. It towered over her and took up twice the space she did, but somehow it’s gaze was at eye length with Belle and she didn’t have to tilt her head up more than a fraction in order to hold its stare. 

And stare, it did. 

It watched Belle closely and she wanted to say placidly, but Belle knew it was foolish to make that assumption when she had no way of judging the thing’s body language or expression – or, at least, what of it there was. 

Still, the longer it simply stayed where it was without doing anything threatening, the less frightened Belle became. Her heartbeat slowed and her breathing evened out and when she swallowed again, she felt less like she was swallowing back the entirety of her stomach trying to push its way up through her throat along with her fear.

She licked her dry lips, thinking.

“Listen,” she started, trying to use the same soft tone she had when she’d asked the creature to let her father go before, though her voice was more cracked now than it was then, “I--”

The creature raised a tentacle and Belle’s words abruptly cut off. 

Her mouth was suddenly too dry and her tongue too leaden to speak. It took every ounce of energy in her body just for her eyes to be drawn to the tentacle, the appendage close enough to her face that Belle could see the suckers on it, just as black as the tentacle itself, so dark that it had been impossible to see them before from a distance. Belle watched it with trepidation as it came closer to her and forced her breathing to stay slow and even – in and out, in and out, in a deliberate bid to keep hold of her nerves.

When the tentacle finally touched her, the coolness of it against her cheek made her flinch despite herself. 

The tentacle trailed from Belle’s cheek to down along her face, tracing her jaw line and leaving a trail of some slick, viscous wetness behind, while she simply stood still, frozen against the wall, and let it, the only outward sign of her repulsion being her fingers digging so hard into the stone wall behind her that they throbbed with pain from her nails threatening to break. 

Belle didn’t know what else to do. She didn’t know what the creature wanted from her or whether trying to get away from it now would make it angry, or worse – make it violent. She only knew that it wasn’t hurting her now and she didn’t want that to change. Its touch was light and gentle for all she wished it would leave her, something like a sleeker version of a cat’s tail winding its way around an ankle or a wrist. It was invasive and unwanted, but if the alternative was pain then Belle thought this was preferable. 

She hoped that her lack of reaction would make the creature lose interest in her and leave her personal space, but if anything it had the opposite effect. The creature seemed to take it as an invitation to do more. 

It moved closer to Belle, its wriggling tentacles all now flush against her body, all of them moving at once, tickling her skin from top to bottom and all along her limbs. There were too many of them to count or even attempt to keep track of, the constant movement of them too overwhelming to even try. Belle squirmed back against the wall, her body trying to get away from from them on instinct, but there was nowhere for her to escape to and nothing she could do but stand there while the creature’s appendages moved against her, spreading whatever fluid was leaking from them across her skin as they did, making her bare skin slick with it like she’d just come out of a pool.

The touch of them was unguided at first, just as mass of writhing wet things moving aimlessly against Belle’s skin with seemingly no purpose to them, but that quickly changed. They began to prod at her, moving with fervor, pushy and insistent. There were so many of them wriggling against Belle that she didn’t notice the two tentacles wrapping around her upper legs until they wrenched her thighs apart, making her gasp from the force of it. 

Panic shot through her then, blowing the calm she’d forced herself to feel away in an instant. She tried to stop the creature, struggling to close her legs again, but the thing’s strength was so great that it was impossible to do more than make the muscles in her thighs ache from trying. 

More tentacles climbed up Belle’s body, twining around her legs like snakes and wrapping around her waist. 

Belle raised her arms to push the creature away but it was as effective as pushing at a brick wall and trying to move a building. The creature was undaunted by Belle’s struggles and her desperation to escape. Even when she began hitting at the thing, slapping at it with her bare palms and then hitting it with her fists, it barely reacted. More tentacles simply wrapped around her arms and forced them above her head like they were little more than a minor nuisance being moved out of the way. Those tentacles kept her arms pinned against the wall, immobilizing Belle better than even chains could. The unnatural strength those extremities possessed prevented her from doing anything more than writhing within their grip, struggling to get free but going nowhere.

Belle felt useless in the creature’s hold, impotent and weak. Her body burned with a panic that not even the cool slickness of the tentacles surrounding her could lessen and her every breath was a gasping shudder that made her head swim with dizziness as her terror threatened to overtake her. Her heart pounded so hard in her chest that she thought it might burst out from beneath her ribs and her throat ached with tightness from a scream caught in it that for some reason she couldn’t release, no matter how much she wanted to.

“Please,” Belle begged, her voice high and reedy and nothing like her own. “Please, let me go.”

The creature didn’t let Belle go.

The only way she knew that it had heard her at all was by the tentacle caressing her jaw line moving inward towards her mouth at the sound of her speaking. It brushed at the side of her lips, pressing at the corner there, prodding as if it wanted to push inside. 

Belle jerked her head away from the touch and shuddered in the creature’s hold, squirming with the desire to get away, but her struggling was just as futile as ever. There was no escaping the thing by her own strength alone, it just wasn’t possible. Belle knew she had little chance of getting out of the creature’s clutches at all unless it chose to let her go. The certainty she had about that made her want to weep and it was an effort not to give in to the heavy lump in her throat where the impulse came from. 

She inhaled a deep, ragged breath and told herself to be calm. To get calm. That panicking and giving in to fear would do nothing to get herself out of this situation. Belle repeated this in her mind like a mantra. Yet when she exhaled, her breath came out in a wheeze that made her chest ache with pain once it left her.

“Please,” she tried again. “Ple—eck.”

Belle’s words were cut off into a choke as the tentacle on her face took advantage of her open mouth to force its way in, plunging between her lips far too quickly for Belle to anticipate or avoid.

She gagged on the tentacle invading her mouth, the appendage stretching her lips wide with it’s girth and leaking the fluid coming from it inside. The fluid was viscous, coating her tongue and the insides of her cheeks like oil with a cloying sweet taste coming with it, so much of it seeping from the tentacle that Belle had no choice but to swallow the fluid or choke. When the end of the tentacle nudged at the back of Belle’s throat, she choked anyway as her body tried to reject it. Her panic drove her to bite down, but it was as useless as trying to push the creature away from her had been, like she was trying to chew her way through a rubber tire. The creature didn’t react like Belle had hurt it at all, but only pulled its tentacle back from her throat, offering Belle a small bit of reprieve until the tentacle pushed back in, attempting to go deeper.

As Belle struggled to breathe through her nose and the tentacle in her mouth began thrusting in and out between her lips, the creature’s other tentacles continued to touch her. The ones around her limbs tightened then softened, tightened then softened, over and over again in their hold of her, the suckers covering them sucking hard at her skin, while more tentacles began moving along her body, getting her wet and slick from the fluid that oozed off of them.

Belle flinched and let out a muffled moan around the tentacle in her mouth when the cool appendages slid between her legs. Some of them pressed at her vulva and some spread out her labia while others nudged at the opening of her cunt, their heads all teasing there like they were all trying to get inside all at once but kept slipping off each other. More tentacles still slid behind her and pressed between her ass cheeks, spreading their wetness there and prodding at her hole. 

Heat burned through Belle, her body flush with humiliation as the creature groped at her in her most private places and her body began responding to it against her will. Her cunt throbbed as a tentacle slid back and forth between her labia, its suckers like a dozen mouths against her clit all at once fighting for the chance to suck it between their lips. Her cunt grew hot from the stimulation, dripping with a wetness of its own that had nothing to do with the slick fluid the tentacles were leaking all over her. Her terror only heightened the pleasure before it gave way to it entirely and her aching arousal became all that Belle could feel.

When the first tentacle finally pushed its way into of Belle’s cunt, her eyes snapped shut and her whole body shuddered. She moaned at the feeling of it in her, stretching her out and thrusting into her in time with the tentacle that was fucking her throat, and then moaned again with something that was a little less pleasurable when the tentacle pressing at her ass pushed its way inside of her, too, the push of it in her bottom more of a drag than a slide, slower and more discomforting than the push of the tentacle in her cunt had been as it had only the creature’s own fluids to ease the way.

Despite the discomfort, it only took the suckers on the tentacle in Belle’s cunt sucking at her insides once for Belle to come, the force of her orgasm washing over her taking her by surprise. She cried out around the tentacle in her mouth as her cunt spasmed with pleasure, gripping at the tentacle inside of it as the appendage thrust and twisted within her. Belle’s muscles strained as her body thrashed in the creature’s hold and waves of pleasure crashed over her again and again, her body flushing with heat as the tentacles in her cunt, ass, and throat continued to fuck her through it and other tentacles still fondled the rest of her body. 

The continued stimulation didn’t give Belle a moment to recover before the pressure was building up between her legs again and she was coming once more, her cries muffled as her second orgasm hit her even harder than the first. Belle breathed heavily through her nose as the tremors of it shook her body, her entire form burning from the heat of it, her thighs aching and pinned arms straining, and her mouth dripping with drool from where her lips were wrapped around the tentacle still fucking between them. 

Belle’s second orgasm was over much faster than the first, the pleasure that peaked within her disappearing just as quickly as it had come, but still the creature’s ministrations didn’t stop and what was once pleasure soon began to give way to discomfort. 

Belle groaned as the tentacle in her mouth kept pushing in and out of her sore throat and the one in her cunt kept fucking her, her hole sloppy from her own fluids and what the creature had leaked within her both, while the tentacle in her ass kept fucking her as well, the thrusts of it much easier now that the appendage had leaked so much fluid inside of her to ease its way until her ass was almost as slick wet as her cunt. 

The tentacles wrapped around her legs sucked bruises from her ankles up to her thighs, making her skin tight and aching, while the tentacles pressing at her vulva and sliding between the folds of her labia made Belle squirm with the desire to get away from them, the stimulation on her oversensitive privates crossing the line from pleasurable to painful and then going further beyond that line into torturous. Other tentacles slid wetly up Belle’s torso, wrapping around her waist and playing with her breasts, the suckers on them right over her nipples and making them ache as badly as her legs were.

Not a single part of Belle’s body went unmolested. The sound of the tentacles fucking and gliding all over every part of her was wet, squelching and lurid. Belle’s muffled sobs and whimpers were the only other sound in the cell. The creature itself made no noise at all, but only wrung one sound after another from Belle with what it was doing to her, with no signs of tiring from its actions.

When Belle came for a third time, her orgasm lasted only seconds, and any semblance of physical pleasure she got from it was as fleeting as the blink of an eye.

When she came for a fourth time, there was no pleasure at all, but only a deep, stabbing pain inside of her that made her sob in agony and desperation for it all to stop. 

But still, the creature didn’t stop. 

It kept fucking Belle, penetrating her so deeply and in so many places she didn’t know where one tentacle thrusting away inside of her started and another one ended. After she came for a fourth time, her cunt felt numb and the stimulation of the tentacles against her vulva were as muffled as her moans, her body so overwrought that another orgasm wasn’t possible. The tentacle in her ass pounded into Belle, going so deep that Belle imagined it was connected to the tentacle fucking her throat and that she was little more than a thing on a skewer being bounced back and forth between them. 

Belle felt outside of her own body as the creature used her. She felt exhausted and pained, dizzy from the short, shallow breaths she was able to take in through her nose, and hot all over despite the cool feeling of the creature’s flesh against her own. Her mind was empty of all thoughts, her eyes shut to her surroundings. Her mind and body were both limp and weak, like she was covered in a thick layer of cotton as she drifted through some sort of dream.

Time passed by hazily, slowly dripping down like molasses, while chunks of it began to go missing entirely.

Belle couldn’t remember when the creature lowered her to the floor, only that one moment she was still pinned against the wall and then suddenly she was aware that she was on her back, her limbs aching with the feeling of pins and needles running through them. Her arms were limp at her sides, too weak to even raise, and her knees were pushed up against her chest and her legs spread wide. The creature was on top of her, two of its tentacles thrusting into her cunt now while a second one was trying to push into her ass with the one still fucking her there, the thing’s weight above her smothering and inescapable. 

She went in and out of consciousness, going from the nothingness of sleep to wakefulness and the vague knowledge that she was still being fucked and then back again, over and over for what could have been hours-lifetimes-months-days-years. When she was awake, Belle was only dimly aware of the motion of her body moving on the floor as the creature fucked her and the sound of the tentacles inside of her moving with wet noises as they fucked in and out of her holes, and little else. 

Her own moans had died down to nothing. Her breathing was shallow and inaudible. Belle herself felt like little more than a dead thing spread out like that, not present in her own body, nothing more than a toy the creature was playing with, a sleeve for its tentacles to slide themselves into and nothing else. On her back on the cold stone floor, Belle forgot she was a person. She forgot her own name and anything but the feeling of being covered by the creature, penetrated by it, fucked by it, used by it in ways that no human man had ever used her before, until she had more of the creature in her than she had of herself.

Belle was so deep in her dissociation that she didn’t even notice it when the creature’s behavior changed, when its tentacles left her ass and mouth and focused solely on penetrating her cunt instead. Two of them in her, three of them, a fourth fucking in and smaller ones trying to push in along side of it, stretching her cunt so wide she would have been horrified if she could see it and terrified that she was about to be ripped open up the middle – but Belle couldn’t see and such feelings were beyond her in the moment. 

It hurt, but Belle’s entire body occupied a world of pain. All of it blended together after awhile, morphing until it was impossible to tell where one ache came from over another, until Belle was in so much agony that she had reached a plateau where she had become numb to any physical stimuli at all.

When something larger than any of the tentacles before it began to push inside of Belle, it was only one hurt settling into a body filled with many. The pain that came from the thing’s round form as it slid between the tentacles keeping her cunt stretched wide was only unique in that it made Belle’s breathing hitch and a low groan break her silence. The weight of the thing settling deep within her as if a ball of heavy iron had been deposited inside of Belle and the horrible stretch of her belly upwards and away from her body from it were likewise met with little reaction. 

Belle hurt and ached and suffered, but the shape of that pain and the knowledge of what had caused her latest hurt were lost to her for the moment. 

And when the creature finally left Belle, afters hours-days-years-seconds-an infinite stretch of time that was both longer and shorter than any measurement of time that Belle could remember, the only thing she felt was its weight leaving her, a purely physical sensation. There was no sense of a burden leaving Belle’s body as the creature got off of her and left, there was only Belle left alone on the floor, a new weight settled heavy in her stomach that the creature had left behind.

*

The world was bright and colorful. The sky was blue and clear. The sun was high in the sky, as it should be in the height of summer, but hidden behind the leaves of the tall oak tree they sat under on a blanket spread out on the ground. 

It was just Belle and her father and a brown picnic basket between them, the both of them holding white tea cups in their hands.

Belle wore a yellow sun dress that came down to just above her knees and no shoes or socks. Her father wore a green sweater and woolen trousers, though it was too warm out for such clothing. He was wearing socks but his shoes seemed to be missing. There was a hole in his right sock where his big toe poked out, the nail there in desperate need of a clipping.

Belle was smiling so hard that her mouth hurt, but she couldn’t remember what she was smiling for. She was not happy, she knew. She was...so very far away from being happy. Dread was a living, coiling thing inside of her, snake-like and writhing. Outside of her, too, constricting her more with every breath.

She wanted to stop smiling, but her lips would not cooperate. 

She wanted to put her tea cup down, but she found her arms wouldn’t move. 

She wanted to get up and stand, but her body would not move, either.

Her father sipped from his cup soundlessly and Belle noticed his throat didn’t move as it would have if he’d swallowed. Belle’s eyes worked when nothing else would and allowed her to glance down at her own cup. It was empty. Somehow Belle knew then that her father’s cup was empty, too, even before he drank. He had only pretended to take a sip, but in actuality had drank nothing at all.

The dread in Belle’s stomach lashed out, an angry cat’s tail sort of motion. Her smile was frozen on her face. Her mouth hurt. Her everything hurt. Her body was one giant bruise, frozen solid in place, a plastic shell empty of organs like a mannequin someone had positioned and left there sitting on the ground.

But still, she continued to smile while her father continued to pretend to drink tea like nothing was wrong even though something inside of Belle’s mind screamed that everything was horribly wrong indeed.

“Do you remember when you were a child?” her father asked her suddenly. His eyes were facing her direction, but he was looking off over Belle’s shoulder and not at her face. He looked angry and bitter, sadder than Belle had seen him in years. “Those first years after your mother died, I was so lost in my grief and you looked so much like her and then when you started talking, you sounded just like her, as well. My beautiful Alina’s face and then her voice in miniature form.”

Belle’s throat tightened and her heart ached at the words, but she was incapable of replying to them.

She kept smiling as if she had never been happier in her life.

Her father went on, “I couldn’t deal with the sight of you, not then, so I made up a little game, do you remember? Whenever it hurt too much to look at you, I handed you a dictionary and told you that I wanted you to memorize some words and that I’d give you a treat for every page that you could prove to me you knew. And every time, you’d take it and go away for a little while and quietly memorize them. You never complained and I never expected you to be so good at it or to learn so quickly, of course. You knew the whole book’s worth by the time you were six and by then, you had that nervous habit of saying all those definitions out loud. When you were sad, you’d give me the definition of melancholy instead of just telling me you were sad and other things like that. Your way of communicating what you couldn’t put into your own words, I supposed, and when I finally pulled myself together enough to notice, it was already a habit for you. Harmless enough, so I let it go. If the only damage my neglect did to you in those early years was make you want to parrot out definitions to yourself, I thought I had been lucky, and I was lucky. Incredibly lucky, Belle. You grew to be...such a good daughter. The kind of daughter your mother would have been proud of.”

Her father’s eyes met hers then and if Belle were capable of it, she would have gasped at the blood dripping out of them in red tear tracks down his cheeks.

Instead, she kept smiling. 

She wanted to scream as the blood continued to come. Her throat ached with the need to, but she was as silent as the grave. Her tea cup was raised half way to her lips and her body was so frozen beyond her control that her arm didn’t even shake despite how long it had been raised in the same position and how much it, like every other part of Belle, ached with hurt. 

She was like a doll at a tea party, unmoving, docile, her joints plastic balls stuck in position and her smile nothing more than a splash of white paint meant to be teeth peeking out from behind her mouth.

“We’re never going to see each other again,” her father told her, his voice mournful and blood pouring out of his mouth with every word, a ruby red flood gushing down his pale neck and soaking his sweater and trousers and the blanket they sat on through as well as any torrent of rain could have done. “You should have left me to die alone in that cell, then you might have escaped and only one of us would be gone, but I can’t live through this again, Belle. Losing your mother was enough. I can’t live in a world so cruel as to take both my wife and child from me.”

The blood had reached Belle now, saturating the blanket beneath her and wetting her legs and the bottom of her canary yellow dress. It was warm, so warm, and Belle smiled and smiled and smiled – 

“Do you remember the definition of the word suicide, Belle?” 

– and smiled and smiled and smiled –

“Designation,” her father gurgled through the blood, “noun. Definition ---”

– and smiled.

*

Belle woke up to tremors wracking her body and the memory of her father’s voice fading from her ears, the latter going from a quieting echo to nothing at all as cramps stabbed through Belle’s stomach down to her lower back and thighs and the pain made her forget her father’s words and any other vestiges of what she could only now dimly recall was not a happy dream. 

The pain she was in now was similar to cramps she’d gotten when she first started her period before she’d started an annual shot regimen to stop her cycle and the pain that came with it both, but these sensations were far worse than that had been. 

They were so much worse.

She groaned as more tremors ran through her and all the muscles from her stomach downwards burned like they were on fire. Belle’s arm was leaden and weighed down as she tried to lift it from her side, but somehow she managed to get it up enough to move her hand over her stomach and – 

her round stomach – 

her hard, round stomach – 

her hard, round, protruding, shouldn’t be round, shouldn’t be hard, shouldn’t stick up like that like she was pregnant, like she was – 

shouldn’t shouldn’t shouldn’t –

it _shouldn’t._

Belle groaned again and her arm flopped back down to the floor, limp and useless. Her pelvis was inflamed, like it was broken, like it had been crushed, like it was on fire and the flames were spreading out from it to the rest of her. Her limbs ached and her throat was sore and her cunt was a hollowed out crater in the center of her, throbbing with agony, a scraped out shell like fruit spooned out of its peel, and her stomach –

there was something in it, something round and heavy and – 

and –

and moving.

Oh god, it was moving.

Belle gasped as the thing in her stomach shifted downwards and the pain in her belly shifted with it. Her gasp turned into a low, tormented groan as it continued to descend within her, as her back arched at an unnatural angle and the protrusion in her stomach moved like a living creature and the stabbing knives that were her cramps twisted and her body flushed both hot and cold at the same time and her tremors were an unending quake that didn’t stop, her teeth chattering in her mouth from the force of them. 

And when the hard, round thing kept moving and Belle’s cunt stung and stretched and burned with a painful, agonizing pressure like the thing wanted to come out of her from there, Belle’s groans turned into screams. 

She screamed and screamed and screamed as her body worked to push the thing out of her against her will. 

She screamed until her voice suddenly went out like a light, cut off into silence.

And then even as the pain ripping through Belle dragged her away from consciousness and back into the dark, in Belle’s head, she kept screaming until the silence swallowed that up, too.

*

Blessing.

Designation: noun.

Definition: a divine favor.

Belle didn’t dream again. 

Were she of a mind to think it and in a mood to count them, she would consider that fact as a blessing if she had ever been granted one.

*

It stayed dark even after Belle woke again. 

The fact that she still hadn’t opened her eyes even after consciousness drifted back to her certainly accounted for it, but Belle had no wish to open them yet and see the confines of her cell and confirmation of what she knew in her heart her reality was sure to be. 

She didn’t want to look at the shape her body was in, because feeling the aches and pains in it were bad enough without seeing the damage under the light of the lichen and knowing the shape of every hurt she felt and the color of the bruises it came from. 

She didn’t want to see the bars at the front of this strange place lowered once more – or, for that matter, not lowered at all.

She didn’t want to know whether the creature had bothered to return the black bars with whatever inexplicable technology it possessed or if it knew, in whatever capacity for knowing it held, that Belle would be too weak to manage to escape and left them gone. She didn’t want to open her eyes and see nothing keeping her prisoner here but her own weakness and have to wonder if the creature had meant it as a matter of pragmatism or taunting.

Belle didn’t want to think about the creature. She didn’t want to have to wonder if what it had done to her was an act of cruelty or an act removed from human reasoning, if being raped by it had been the same as if a man had raped her back on earth and entailed all the reasons men raped women behind it or if the hours of pain she had endured had all the malice behind them as a tornado or a hurricane or some other natural disaster might.

Belle didn’t want to, so – 

she didn’t.

She kept her eyes closed and looked out into the darkness of her eyelids and she imagined she was dead, floating through purgatory, some place beyond the pain in her body and the memories of what had caused it, all of that just out of reach. She thought of nothing. She thought of inconsequential things. She thought of a girl she had went to school with as a child who used to splatter fake blood all over herself and lay perfectly still on the ground, pretending she was dead until someone found her and started screaming in horror. 

Belle had thought the other girl perverse then even before her father had her memorize the permit through petcock page of the dictionary and she ever knew what the word perverse or its definition were. 

A disconnected part of Belle observed that she was doing the same thing now, only she had little hope that anyone would find her that she wanted to be found by. 

She thought of the word perverse, the way her lips might press together on the first syllable and her teeth would dig into her bottom lip on the second if she said it aloud, the definition of it in her mind not formed by other words but in pictures of ink black tentacles and the slide of them inside of her, around her, burrowing into the deepest, reddest parts of her body until she could swear they were swimming in her blood.

Nausea rose up in her throat and Belle pushed the thought away.

She thought of something else.

She thought of being dead.

Time passed that way for a long while, Belle a dead thing in the dark. 

The need to sleep again was beyond her. She wasn’t hungry or thirsty, though she knew it had been a long time since she’d consumed the meal replacement bar and water she’d had before she found her father. She had no need to relieve herself, either, though Belle also knew that it had been even longer since she’d done that. A small, inquisitive part of Belle’s mind found both those facts odd, but her curiosity was a dead thing, too, and Belle didn’t wonder at them for long. 

She could have laid there drifting in the dark for the rest of her life if the sound hadn’t pulled her away from it.

It started off as skittering scratch, so soft that Belle wouldn’t have heard it at all if it weren’t for the otherwise total lack of noise in the cell. Her throat tightened with dread when she noticed it and she thought that it was the sound of the creature out in the hall returning to her, but as it grew louder Belle quickly realized that whatever was making the noise was already in the cell with her. That it had been for who knew how long, because surely she would have heard it if it had come in at any point since she’d been awake? 

Her foreboding increased until it turned into panic, a simmering sense of dreadful anticipation that crashed over her in waves. A cold sweat broke out along her skin as her heart pounded with it. Belle didn’t want to open her eyes and see whatever the source of the sound was, but the thought of keeping them closed was much worse. She imagined laying there with her eyes shut just waiting for some creeping tendril to reach out and grab her, not knowing when it would happen until she felt its cold flesh wrapping around her limbs. She had to take a deep breath just so she wouldn’t be sick from thinking about it.

The noise grew louder, crackling like a camp fire.

Belle knew she couldn’t stay in the dark. 

She took another deep breath to steel herself before she opened her eyes. She had to blink them a few times to get rid of the blurriness, feeling the sting leftover from crying as she did. Once her vision was clear, she pushed herself up – or tried to, at least. She couldn’t manage to raise herself from the floor. Her arms felt like limp noodles, loose and weak, and her body too heavy for them to handle. They shook under her weight, aching with it, while she tried and failed to get herself into a sitting position. 

Belle cursed in her mind at how something as simple as sitting up was proving to be so difficult and finally gave up trying altogether when her efforts only made her hurt more. She managed to maneuver herself onto her side instead, half on her stomach with one arm thrown out on the ground in front of her and the other still trapped beneath her. She grimaced as her body shifted, pain shooting through it as she moved, and hated how such little movement had drained her so badly. She only had a moment to register that the bars to the cell were back in place after all before the noise sounded again and her eyes immediately narrowed in on the source of it.

There was an object on the floor less than a meter away from Belle, a round white thing about the size of a child’s ball. The skittering, scratching noise was coming from inside of it and every time the sound came, the object moved, rolling a little in one direction and then another like an invisible hand was idly pushing it back and forth.

Belle watched the object’s movement with a morbid curiosity that slowly gave way to a dawning sense of horror as she began to recall the fractured memories that were nearly lost to her in the sea of pain that surrounded them. A sort of haze hung over them like they were scenes from a movie she had watched long ago rather than something she had experienced herself only recently, but they were somehow still visceral and vivid all the same.

Belle remembered the creature fucking her with her back flat on the ground and legs spread as its tentacles penetrated her, one after another stuffing her full to the brim, too many of them doing too much all at once for it to be anything but torturous. She remembered blacking out somewhere in the middle of it and waking up alone she couldn’t guess how long later, still tormented by the state her body was in. Her hand had risen weakly from the ground then to touch her aching stomach only to find it extended upwards, the shape of it perfectly round and revolting. The pain that had come next was so great that it burned the revulsion right out of her as it spread from her stomach down the rest of her body and made it impossible to focus on anything else.

Belle remembered something moving inside of her, low in her belly.

She remembered the agony of it moving through her and the excruciating stretch of her cunt as her body forced it out.

Disgust churned in Belle’s stomach now as her mind put all the pieces together. It wasn’t difficult for her to reach the conclusions that she did – that the round thing that had been inside of her and the round thing on the floor were one in the same. That the creature had put it in her. That she’d pushed it out of her body in some horrible facsimile of giving birth. 

And that, as horrific as the thought was and as much as Belle didn’t want to accept it, the object must be exactly what it looked like. 

The size was much larger and it was round instead of ovular, but the bright white color of it was familiar to Belle and so was the way the surface looked, like the smooth shell of an egg. Only unlike the eggs Belle bought at the market on Earth, this one wasn’t inert. The movement of it, the sounds coming from inside of it – there was more in this egg than just unfertilized yolk and white. There was something in it, something alive and trapped. 

Something that was trying to get out. 

Belle’s heartbeat quickened and heat crawled up the back of her neck. She tried to take deep breaths to stave off the anxiety that was beating its wings in her chest, but it did little to help. She was ill as she watched the egg move, sick with the certainty that it had been inside of her and nauseous at remembering how it had gotten out. The very existence of it was a violation on top of all the other violations Belle had already suffered through and she thought she might vomit looking at it. Every scritching sound coming from inside of it made nausea ebb and flow within her, her skin clammy and tight from it like it had shrunk down and now she could barely fit inside of her own body.

Belle stared at the egg, revulsion pulsing hot within her, and it was only because she was staring so hard that she saw the first little piece of shell fly off of it. 

It was only a speck at first, a tiny white shard that dropped to the ground with as much fanfare as an eyelash falling off a cheek. That piece was followed by a larger chip coming off immediately after, a soft cracking sound coming with it that made Belle’s breath catch in her throat and her heart thud heavily on its next beat. Her throat was so tight it felt like she was being strangled as she looked at the small place on the egg where the broken off chip of shell used to be. 

It was black, that place. At first Belle thought the blackness was only shadow but then it moved, shifting within the egg. More shell chipped off and Belle watched in horrified fascination as the pointed tip of a thin black tendril peeked itself out, snakelike and shy. Another tendril joined it, slithering out of the opening alongside the first before they split, one going left and the other right, and the rest of the egg’s shell split with it, cracking in two.

A jolt of panic slammed into Belle’s chest like a bolt of lightning. Despite her pain, it was enough to make her move. She flailed against the floor, groaning at the bone deep ache that throbbed through her, and struggled to crawl away as fast as she could make herself go. 

By the time she managed to make it to the cell’s stone wall and pull herself up so that she was sitting with her back against it, she was breathing hard, her body flush with the heat of exertion. Her whole form was heavy, dead limbed and exhausted, but no matter how tired she was, Belle was still alert. Hyper-vigilant as she fought to catch her breath and stared at the thing that had come out of the egg.

The thing stared back at her. 

Its single diamond-shaped eye was unblinking as it gazed at her from where it stood on the small mass of tentacles that made up its bottom half, undulating slightly between the two broken shells of egg it had come from and covered in some kind of viscous goo that was just a shade off from being clear. This creature looked identical to the other one, only so much smaller. The shape of it was the same and the coloring, but it was nowhere near as large as the other or even a fourth of its size. Had Belle seen it in a film on Earth, she might have gone so far as to call it cute.

There in her cell, however, all Belle felt when she looked at it was revulsion. 

In a way this creature was worse to her than the other. What the larger thing had done to her was horrible and beastly, but thinking of an egg being inside of her – of pushing it out, giving birth to it – made Belle sick in a way she’d never been before. It felt like more of a violation in some way she couldn’t define, a way that made her feel small and used, like she was a thing herself, just a means to an end. If the larger creature fucking her had made her feel like a toy, then this smaller one made her feel like an incubator. Somehow the latter felt worse.

It wasn’t this little creature’s fault, it wasn’t the one that had hurt her, but no matter how much Belle knew that logically, she couldn’t find it in herself to feel charitable towards it. She looked at the thing and her skin crawled. Every ache in her body reminded her that it had come out of her, that she would be considered its mother by some definitions of the word because of it.

Belle didn’t even know if she wanted children of her own. She always found the idea of childbirth vaguely disgusting and being a parent intimidating, but she had never put the possibility of doing it someday aside completely. The years had gone on and it had always remained a distant possibility – one she wasn’t quite interested in pursuing, but never concretely decided that it wasn’t in her future.

The disgust that filled her at thinking of having any kind of maternal connection to this thing made all of her misgivings about that seem almost laughable in comparison. Her previous discomfort at the possibility of someday being a mother was nothing compared to the reality before her. The sight of this thing that had been forced into her then forced from her sickened her. She had no more of a maternal connection towards it than she would a tumor excised from her brain.

Belle wished she could get away from it, to put it out of sight, but she was more aware than ever there was nowhere for her to go. Her back was to a wall and the bars to her cell were back in place even if she could muster the strength to cross the distance to them. The creature, at least, wasn’t making any moves to come closer to her. It stayed where it had hatched, its form wriggling in place, and just stared at Belle, its focus as unblinking as it was unnerving. 

Belle was at a loss.

She tried to push aside her feelings and ignore the pain that still radiated through her, but it was difficult. Even when she managed to force herself to think of things more analytically, it only made her frustrated. No matter how many books she’d read about animals on Earth or how many hours she’d spent in survival courses, none of it had prepared her for this. She had no way of knowing what manner of creature the one in the cell with her or the bigger one was, not really. 

The larger creature was physically strong, that much was obvious. It had access to technology of some sort that Belle couldn’t fathom and that her scans of M49-6822 hadn’t picked up. It had seemed to, if not understand her when she spoke to it, at least be capable of listening to her speak which suggested some form of intelligence. 

Belle recalled the things her father had told her about the creature experimenting on him and realized what he’d meant by it only in hindsight, his cagey demeanor and vague answers suddenly making sense. Nausea churned in her stomach imagining that thing hurting her father as it had her, but Belle tried to swallow it down. She tried to think. 

Her father had said the thing’s experiments on him had failed, but that it might find Belle more suitable. Belle wondered if that meant the creature could only reproduce with a female host for its egg, but if that were true – no other human being had set foot on the surface of M49-6822 before Belle’s father. Belle was the first woman to ever be on the moon. If these creatures could only use a woman, then where had the larger creature come from? It had to have been born somehow itself. It had to have a sire of some kind. If there were others like it on the moon besides the small one in her cell, they would have to have sires, too.

Maybe it wasn’t necessary for the creature to have used her in that way, then. Maybe it could have laid its egg anywhere but had simply chosen to put it in her for some other reason – because it was curious or malicious or because of some other reason entirely. 

Belle knew she couldn’t possibly understand no matter how hard she tried to. She couldn’t use human logic to reason out the motivations of another species or assume that the creature’s thought process was in any way similar to her own. For all she knew, the thing didn’t have a thought process at all. Maybe she was overestimating its intelligence and all it had was animal impulses, instincts that drove it that not even it could discern. 

And maybe it didn’t matter one way or another because even if Belle knew everything about what made the creature tick, there was no guarantee that it would get her out of the cell – not that it would matter much if it could. 

Even if she managed to escape and make it back to her shuttle as naked and as aching as she was, without her techpad there would be no way to even open its door much less use it to escape and set a course back to Earth and that was only if her father hadn’t destroyed the vessel. Belle didn’t want to believe he did, that he would leave her here with no possible way to escape, but the way he’d acted –

Belle bit down harshly on the inside of her cheek and thumped her head back against the wall, relishing in the two points of pain that flared up from it if only because it was at least pain that she herself had caused. The word hopeless came to mind. So did useless, trapped, and a litany of other adjectives that made Belle want to thump her head back again even harder in frustration. 

She turned away from her thoughts so she wouldn’t do that, focusing back on the creature instead. 

It was still there, still watching her. Despite herself, Belle was curious about what it saw as it looked. Did it recognize her as its mother, whatever disgust Belle herself had for the word and the connotations that came with it? Did it think she was its family or its friend? Or did it see her no differently than she might have seen a bird in a tree back on Earth, just another part of the scenery, a defenseless animal whose life held no baring on its own?

Whatever the thing thought of her, Belle found herself grateful that at least it was being docile at the moment. She would rather be alone than have it in the cell with her if she had to be in the cell at all, but she supposed it could be worse. The bigger creature could be with her. She could be trapped with someone as awful as Gaston. Her father could still be with her, too, and if there was any silver lining Belle clung to, it was that – that her father wasn’t there. He was gone, hopefully on a course back to Earth as she sat thinking about him, and no matter what happened to Belle, at least she could hold on to the fact that it had been worth it just to set him free.

Better it be just her imprisoned than the both of them. Belle would find being forced into any sort of terrible company a fair price to pay if her father’s freedom was what she got in return. Still, though – Belle wished neither of them had been put in the position for her to have to make such a bargain in the first place, as little good as wishing was going to do her now.

A little bit away from her, the creature still stared, its one eye focused on her and its body undulating in place. 

Belle stared back at it – and then she stared harder. 

It looked...bigger than it did before. Not by much, but it seemed taller, bulkier, its tentacles thicker – just enough of a difference to be noticeable, just enough to make Belle’s stomach flip with the dissonance of the change. 

She wondered if maybe it was just her tiredness catching up with her or something about the lighting in the cell. The lichen weren’t that bright, after all, not as much as the lighting anywhere on Earth would be, so maybe the creature had always been that size. Maybe – but even as Belle’s mind tried to explain it away, all the explanations fell flat. 

She swallowed hard and wrapped her arms around herself as tight as she could. It did nothing to comfort her, however. It just made her ribs ache, the bruises left behind from the other creature’s suction cups stinging at the pressure of her touch. 

Despite that, Belle didn’t let go of herself. 

She only squeezed her arms tighter and shut her eyes at the throbbing pain it produced, grimacing at it yet holding on all the same. It hurt, but there was some kind of twisted comfort in the pain of it and how it lingered. It reminded Belle she was still alive, that she wasn’t mad or going that way. She was just tired, hurt and understandably stressed. She’d been imprisoned and raped. Even if she didn’t feel hungry or thirsty, it had still been god only knew how long since she ate or drank anything. There was nothing abnormal about her mind playing tricks on her in those circumstances, nothing at all.

Belle kept her eyes shut and her breathing deep and told herself she wasn’t going insane – that she wouldn’t go insane – thinking it like both a promise and a plea. She wouldn’t let her confinement do to her what her father’s did to him. She refused to. The thing keeping her here may have taken her body and her freedom and even her damn clothes, but Belle wouldn’t let it take her mind on top of it. If she had nothing else left, she swore to herself that she would never part with that.

Her conviction felt strong enough until she opened her eyes and found the creature barely an arm’s length away from her and so much larger than it had been before her eyes had closed.

Any thoughts Belle had fled her, replaced by heart-pounding panic and unintelligible fear. She couldn’t stop the shriek that escaped her, violently ripping its way from her mouth. Her whole body flinched, her head slamming back into the wall with all the force she had denied herself before, but the pain of it barely registered through the shock of the thing in front of her, the small creature that was no longer small at all. 

It wasn’t as big as the other one, but that was no relief. It still towered over Belle where she sat, its single eye staring her down, tentacles writhing beneath it. One tendril reached out to her and Belle reacted on impulse, lashing out and slapping it away before it could touch her. The tentacle jerked away as if it had been burned, but the creature was only deterred for a moment. It started to reach out to her again, tentative like, and Belle’s stomach dropped.

The thought of having the cool, wet touch of tentacles on her skin again sickened her. It made her body flush with a prickling heat and her stomach roil with nausea. Her chest was heavy like a weight was on top of it, a pressure pushing her down and making it hard to breathe. 

Belle thought in the moment that she’d rather die than feel it again and then she thought she would die if she had to feel it, the fear of it so strong that it seemed a certainty that if the creature touched her, her heart would stop beating on the spot. Her panic swelled until it was consuming her and when the creature’s tentacle came close to her again, something in her burst. She cried out and slapped the thing away even harder than she did the first time, the hit so vicious that it made her palm sting from the impact. 

She barely had time to realize that she’d made a mistake.

The creature reared back and struck her across the face with one of its tentacles so hard that it made pain explode across her cheek and the inside of her mouth well up with blood. Belle’s ears had only just started ringing from the hit when the creature started to emit a high shrieking sound that made the pain in Belle’s cheek feel like a paper cut by comparison. 

If the noise the other creature had made when her father had shot it was ice picks in her ears, then this noise was needles. They jammed into her eardrums, thin and sharp, as agonizing as a thousand nails on a chalkboard. Belle’s body shook with the noise, her skin vibrating and itching like there were ants crawling under it. She had to clench her hands into weak fists to stop herself from trying to claw herself open to get them out.

The sound continued. Belle was only acutely aware of trying to cover her ears, of crying out and begging the creature to stop. She gasped for breath and bit her tongue, more blood spilling in her mouth from it, hot and coppery and sour. Belle only knew the noise finally had stopped when the worst of the pain ended, going from sharp agony to a dull throb and all she could hear was a loud ringing. 

She was still struggling to catch her breath when the creature’s tentacles wrapped tightly around her arms and she flinched at the coolness of them on her. She tried to jerk her arms away on instinct, but it was futile. The tentacles’ grip only tightened on her before they wrenched Belle away from the wall and threw her to the floor, forcing her onto her belly with a hard thud. Something Belle meant to be a no or a stop or don’t was wrenched from her mouth as more of a gasp than a word, the coherency of speech knocked out of her from the impact. Her arms were trapped under her, her body weaker than ever and her ears still rang while her head throbbed so badly the image of the floor beneath her was blurry with double vision. 

Then suddenly, something struck her across the ass.

The hit from what Belle knew could only be a tentacle was hard and stinging. Her whole body jerked beneath it, the sound of it smacking her loud even over her pained shout of surprise. The tentacle had barely left her before it came back and hit her again, then again and again and again after, raining down blow after blow on her ass and the backs of her thighs with as much viciousness as it had hit her across the face with. 

Belle’s backside burned with heat from the strikes. The rest of her was flush, feverish and wet from perspiration and the slick fluid leaking from the tentacles both. The hot ache of the creature’s hits built until Belle’s skin went numb to the sting of it and all she could feel was the impact of the tentacle slamming down on her and the burn left behind. She sobbed into the floor, her breathing ragged and hitching with every hit, until her sobs were cut off into a scream when the tentacle came down and struck Belle not on the ass but right between her legs. 

The impact of it was shocking. The sharp sting against her labia sent a jolt through Belle’s clit that made her cunt clench with something that was too close to pleasure for comfort and too full of pain to be entirely pleasurable. Whether the creature did it on purpose or not, Belle didn’t know, but she knew it noticed her reaction. It paused for a moment before its tentacles shifted around her, maneuvering her so that her ass was raised higher than the rest of her. Tentacles forced her thighs to spread so wide that her muscles twinged in pain. They exposed her cunt to the creature’s sight before she was struck again right in the center of herself, a tentacle spanking her hard from clit to entrance and forcing a pained moan out of her mouth

The creature wasted no time before it struck her there again and then kept at it, spanking Belle’s cunt repeatedly in rapid succession while Belle cried out with every hit. Her cunt throbbed as it was abused, clenching on the emptiness inside of her as every hit sent an agonizing burst of pleasure through her body. The creature’s other tentacles began spreading over her, some of them stroking her almost gently while others slapped her ass and her breasts. Belle was humiliated to feel herself growing wet from the assault, her body pushing back into the tentacle spanking her rather than trying to get away, but she couldn’t stop her body’s reactions. She moaned through them, crying, as every smack of the tentacles against her most sensitive places drove her closer and closer to the edge.

It was almost a relief when one of them finally forced its way inside of her, filling the emptiness in her cunt with something thick and moving. All it took was the tentacle pulling nearly all the way out of her before thrusting almost violently back in for Belle to come, crying out as her cunt spasmed around it and wave after wave of pleasure washed over her while another tentacle continued to spank her where her cunt was stretched around its twin from behind. 

The mix of pain and pleasure dragged her orgasm out until it began to build back up again. Belle soon found herself coming for the second time in as many minutes, pushing back and meeting the tentacle fucking her like she was desperate for it. Her cunt was oversensitive, aching and hot. Wetness spilled out from her at every thrust of the tentacle into her body. It dripped down her thighs as the tentacles hitting her became little more than background noise to the pleasure burning through her.

In the moment, Belle wished that pleasure would last forever. She wished she could drown in it and let it wash awareness away from her for good, that she could just get lost in the dizzying high of it while everything else outside of it ceased to exist. 

But it didn’t last. 

The moment died as abruptly as if Belle had finally hit the jagged ground at the bottom of a cliff after the long fall down. Pleasure was replaced by pain and discomfort – the ache of her vulva, the bruised heat of her ass, her hands gone numb where they were still trapped beneath her between the hard floor and her body. If there was any afterglow, it was extinguished too soon for Belle to enjoy it, taken over by humiliation and disgust for both herself and the creature still on her, still inside of her, its tentacles surrounding her with no sign of leaving or stopping what they were doing. 

Deja vu twisted in Belle’s chest like a knife. Her breathing hitched, then quickened. Her throat went so tight she couldn’t swallow.

It was never going to end. 

The thought stood out to Belle more than anything else, cutting into her like a shard of glass. It hurt more than any bruise on her, more than the discomfort of where her body was stretched around the tentacles still thrusting inside of it, more than any other ache on her or within her. 

It was never going to end. 

This was going to be her life now. She was going to be trapped there forever, forced to be some monster’s incubator or experiment or toy or whatever they saw her as. She would never get out of the cell. She would never get off of the moon. She’d never go back to Earth, never see her father again, never sleep in her own bed or laugh with her friends or visit her mother’s grave or – 

A loud clanging sound rang out.

Belle’s too fast breathing hitched in surprise before she inhaled a deep, ragged breath that made her see stars when she blinked. Her stomach turned with nausea as recognition flared to life in her mind. She knew that sound. She’d heard it before. She remembered her surprise then, a pale thing compared to the panic that had her skin breaking out into a cold sweat now.

“No,” Belle choked out even before she heard another sound like leaves rustling and whispers coming closer to her. “No, no, no...”

Tentacles appeared in her field of vision, in front of her as the creature behind her kept fucking her and didn’t so much as pause as its own tentacles kept thrusting into her body. 

Belle didn’t want to look up, she didn’t want to see, she didn’t want to know – but the choice was taken from her.

A tentacle reached out and gripped her under the chin and Belle had to bite her lip to stop herself from screaming. It pushed up, forcing her to lift her head, to meet the single eye staring at her from the creature in front of her, so much larger than the one still fucking her. 

It blinked at her and its tentacle slid to her cheek to caress her almost gently before it closed the distance between them and it joined the monster it had made in surrounding her with its tentacles, so until Belle was covered by them, drowning in them and blinded to everything but blackness.


End file.
